Zoo, Sanctuaries and the Wild

A brief message to explain what can be done as studies with primates.

Zoos are an easy way to study apes because you don't need to go far inside the jungle to find them. They are all just nearby. For some zoos in particular, the facilities are great to conduct experiments, such as the Wolfgang Köhler Center in Leipzig, Germany, Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, USA or Edimburgh Zoo in Scotland, the latter which will shortly open new facilities for primates. Those places allow researchers to conduct cognitive experiments with great apes which allow us to learn about their cognitive abilities. We already know that their mind is different from ours (likely, they don't talk so it's unlikely that they have an inner speech). The goal of such experiment is to know how their mind, which is a great challenge when you consider that we can not do otherwise than thinking with our inner speech. The great question is: is it possible to think without a language, up to which point, and how? The first answer is yes. Others are still investigated.

Sanctuaries is another way to study apes. Basically, these are also kind of zoos, where apes have facilities to sleep in. However, they spend most of their time outside, in broad protected areas of rain forest that could make them thinking of how it use to be when they were young. In fact, most of those apes are orphans who were confiscated from people in cities who possessed them as pets. The observations that are done with them will always have to take into account this fact, that can really change an apes' mind (Remember Makasi who did not have the support from his mother during infancy? Imagine what it is when you see your mother being slaughtered in front of your eyes...). Just in case, the work accomplished by people in sanctuaries is absolutely amazing and if you can just support them a little, that will be a great step. Any financial help is welcome and no matter how much you can give, it will be always really appreciated (I will advise again to visit wildlifedirect website where many blogs allow to make donation...).

Finally the wild... The wild is terrific. Terrific because it's great to go in the wild to try to find out if what has been found in zoo and sanctuaries is really what happens in the wild, terrific also because you spend a lot of time and money for a minimal amount of data collected. Therefore, my feeling about it is that, even if it's a necessary step, it has to be done at the end of the study, when you know already what you are looking for. What I mean by that strange sentence is that you must have a really clear idea of what you have to look at, in order to exploit to the maximum any opportunities that will arrive. And they don't arrive that frequently...



TG