Chimpanzee anthropomorphism gone wrong
Cringe TV I won't be watching but is probably worth watching
I never saw Tiger King. As much I enjoy cringeworthy TV and needed an escape from the daily grind of the pandemic back when it premiered in 2020, I couldn’t stomach watching majestic tigers trapped on a ramshackle farm in Oklahoma. Now the maker of Tiger King (Eric Goode) is back with a new docuseries about a woman in Missouri who raises and sells captive chimpanzees. It’s called Chimp Crazy, and it’s crammed with a fascinating and somewhat bizarre form of anthropomorphism.
The series follows the life of Tonia Haddix, former owner of The Missouri Primate Foundation (formerly named Chimparty), which used to breed chimpanzees for use in film, television, and commercials, or to sell to wealthy oddballs who want a pet chimpanzee. This practice is (somehow?) legal in 29 US states. After the facility was shut down in 2021 due to the poor welfare conditions for the apes living there, the remaining six chimpanzees were taken to a sanctuary. Haddix claimed that one of the chimpanzees, Tonka, wasn’t available to go with the others because he had died. In reality, she’d taken Tonka to her home where he was locked in a cage in her basement, and given an iPad so he could watch YouTube all day. The docuseries focuses on Haddix, her relationship with Tonka (who was finally moved to a sanctuary in 2022), and the PETA lawsuits against her and the former facility.
Now I am not going to get into the details of the show as I have not watched it (nor am I planning to), but I can mention that PETA is keen for you to watch it because the series “shares almost unbelievable details of the lengths that some people in the industry go to harbor and subjugate these complex great apes.” The hope is that if enough people are outraged at how these chimpanzees are treated, there might be more public sympathy for legislation to one day ban the “private ownership and interstate or foreign commerce of nonhuman primates” at the federal level.
What interests me is the specific way in which Haddix is anthropomorphizing these chimpanzees. I am currently working on a book about anthropomorphism, so I couldn’t help but notice the promo marketing for the show where Haddix says things like this:
I love these chimps more than anything in the world, and I mean more than anything – more than my kids, more than anything.
Anthropomorphism is the act of treating an animal (or object or chat bot or whatever) like you would a fellow human being. In some cases, this coincides with believing that the animal (or object or chat bot or whatever) has a mind that is equivalent or identical to a fellow human, complete with emotions, thoughts, desires, etc. that are indistinguishable from your own. In the case of chimpanzees - our closest living relatives - their minds are, in fact, similar to human minds in many ways. But, without getting into the weeds here, they are not identical to humans. Which is why, even though Haddix loves Tonka, she still kept him in a cage - something she probably didn’t do with her own children. That’s because of the extremely large risk that Tonka would rip Haddix to shreds if the mood struck him, which Haddix clearly understands, even if she won’t admit it on camera (or to herself). ”Tonka love[s] me as much as I love Tonka,” she tells us. “It’s like your love for God.”
The weird thing about Haddix’s anthropomorphism, which appears to be the focus of the docuseries, is that she believes that she and Tonka are on the same page when it comes to their loves, desires, and understanding of the world, ignoring the obvious fact that chimpanzees, as PETA put it, “don’t want to be humans’ playmates or roommates.” As similar as chimpanzees are to humans, what a chimpanzee really wants more than anything is to be with other chimpanzees in an environment that they feel comfortable in (i.e., not a basement in a McMansion). The disconnect for Haddix is that her anthropomorphic love for chimpanzees is blinding her to what the chimpanzees are actually thinking and feeling. As Eric Goode describes her to The Guardian, “she can’t see or couldn’t see what you and I may see with the chimps in her care and how that was probably a very one-sided love affair.”
Now I am set to argue in my new book that anthropomorphism is usually a good thing, and has gotten a bad rap for far too long (i.e., thousands of years). But the case of Haddix is a fine example of anthropomorphism gone wrong. Her need to see the human-ness in her chimpanzees is blinding her to the chimpanzee-ness of their minds. She isn’t able to imagine what it must be like from their perspective; something that comes from a desire to seek out the differences between human and chimpanzee minds. Imagining what it’s like to be a chimpanzee by assuming it has human-like cognition is actually a pretty good starting point for this kind of investigation insofar as they share so much of our cognition thanks to the relatively recent split on our ancestral paths. But it’s the differences here that matter.
Haddix’s anthropomorphism seems to have blinded her to those differences, which is where the welfare concerns take root. There is little doubt that these chimpanzees are miserable living in Haddix’s basement or the breeding facility insofar as they are not able to live a normal chimpanzee life in the company of other chimpanzees doing normal chimpanzee stuff. That’s an oversimplification of the welfare problem, but that’s really the only takeaway one needs to know from this series - and a worthy takeaway at that.
Still, I am not going to watch it. My heart bleeds too much for these chimpanzees to watch them go through this crap. But if you’re at all curious as to how anthropomorphism can blind us (and I mean all of us) to the reality of an animal’s inner life, then this is probably worth watching.
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In other news, I had a great conversation with the sci-fi author Peter Watts for the podcast The Science in The Fiction. Watts is the author of Blindsight and Starfish and a slew of other books, and has won and been nominated for tons of awards. He’s also got a PhD in Zoology having studied marine mammals, so we have a lot in common, including a similar form of good-natured misanthropy. I really enjoyed chatting with Peter! You can listen to us chat at this link.
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Also, philosopher Jonathan Birch has written a new book called The Edge of Sentience (published by Oxford University Press) which you can download for free (!!!) at this link: edgeofsentience.com. Here’s info from the publisher:
Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. We desperately want certainty, but it is out of reach. The stakes are immense, and neglecting the risks can have terrible costs. We need to err on the side of caution, yet it's often far from clear what 'erring on the side of caution' should mean in practice. When are we going too far? When are we not doing enough?