Quotes About Chimpanzees

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

By the time of the agricultural revolution, we see multiplication and expansion of genes that encode salivary amylase, an enzyme in your spittle that initiates the digestion of complex molecules. Some people have eighteen copies of it, but chimpanzees only have two.

There is less genetic variation in the entire human race than in a typical wild population of chimpanzees.

Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can't tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can't be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, and a Senator against us, we got hammered.

A humane research environment for chimpanzees is very, very expensive. I'm sure Miller would have been much happier if we'd locked all the chimps in four-by-five cages. When we lost our funding, we had to shut down the project immediately. This was a terrible loss to science. I can't even begin to tell you. But it also affected Jennie. It was the beginning of the end.

If the murder rate that Jane Goodall saw among the several dozen chimpanzees she studied in Gombe were extrapolated to New York City, for example, there would be over fifty thousand murders a year there. "Man is the only animal that kills for pleasure" you hear people say. What poppycock!

She became particularly irritable toward me and Sandy. She would not allow us to approach her, let alone touch her, and she often broke into loud screams if we approached. She also became curiously incommunicative and ignored many of our efforts to sign to her. Lea and I knew well that chimpanzees become difficult when they reach puberty. And yet, we had managed to persuade ourselves that Jennie would be different. We felt we knew Jennie even better than we knew each other. We were wrong.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

When you meet chimps you meet individual personalities. When a baby chimp looks at you it's just like a human baby. We have a responsibility to them.

It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.

Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

Es tan fuerte el prejuicio a favor de nuestra especie, inspirado en nuestra actitud cristiana, que el aborto de un solo zigoto humano (la mayoría de ellos están destinados, de todas maneras, a abortar espontáneamente), puede generar más preocupación moral y más justa indignación que la vivisección de un número indeterminado de chimpancés adultos.

He repeated a thing he'd said many times before—that most religions were obsessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d'être. He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. "The only difference," he said, "is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God's orders.

He repeated a thing he'd said many times before – that most religions were obessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d'être. He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. "The only difference," he said, "is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God's orders.

Like it or not, war is distinctively human. Apart from the raiding behavior of chimpanzees and the so-called wars prosecuted by certain species of ant, there is nothing in nature that comes anywhere near approximating it.

I'm always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

Muy sensible es la reacción de una comunidad de chimpancés en una jaula cuando un miembro de la familia toma LSD. Aunque en el propio animal no puedan comprobarse cambios, toda la jaula se alborota, porque el chimpancé con LSD aparentemente deja de cumplir con precisión las leyes del muy sutil orden jerárquico familiar.

Through my work with PETA, I have learned a great deal about chimpanzee behavior and the plight of chimpanzees imprisoned in laboratories.

We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.

La divergence entre l'Homme et les Chimpanzés, ou entre l'Homme et le couple Chimpanzé-Gorille, ne date que de 7 millions d'années environ

All social mammals from chimpanzees to rats have ethical codes that limit behavior like theft and murder.

The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.

The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.