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talk about their personalities; only humans had personalities. I certainly could not talk about them

having minds capable of rational thought, even though it was demonstrated that they used and even
made tools, ripping leaves off twigs and using objects in many different ways. But only humans had
minds capable of rational thought. Worst of all was talking about animals having feelings. Animals
could not feel happy or sad, they could not possibly feel fearful or filled with despair. Only humans
could have these emotions, most scientists declared.”

“Gradually, over the years since those early 60s, there has been a change in science. There are still
scientists who will not agree that animals have minds or personalities or feelings. Usually, those
are the ones who are conducting some fairly cruel form of research. We still find people who think
that mere animals do not have feelings. They are very often those people who are doing things like
raising animals in intensive farms for food or hunting them.”

“We owe a debt of gratitude to the chimpanzees, these amazing beings. When you have spent the
time, like I have, with chimpanzees, you know how much like us they are. Where we used to think
there was a big chasm between us and the rest of the animal kingdom, you can now imagine a
chimpanzee walking towards you and he is reaching out over that big chasm. And he is looking into
your eyes and saying, “Don’t I matter in your field of compassion?” and if you dare to look back into
those eyes and take that hand, he is going to look back over his shoulder and say, “What about

them? What about all these other amazing animals with whom we
share this planet? Don’t they matter too?”

“Chimpanzees teach us to feel humble. They teach us so
clearly that we are not the only beings with personalities,
minds, and feelings. And that, you see, leads to this new
respect—not only for chimpanzees, but for gorillas, and
other great apes for, we, by the way, are the fifth great ape.
We are simply an ape. It is not only the other apes that we
need to have respect for, with their brains so like ours, and
their blood so like ours, it is also the other amazing animals
with whom we share this planet, like the mountain lions.”

“It is very sad to find out that right across the world, animals
are losing out. In Africa, a hundred years ago, there were may be
close to 20,00,000 chimpanzees stretched right across twenty-five countries, across the Equatorial
forest belt. Today at the very most, there are only 2,00,000. They are disappearing as their habitat

steadily disappears under the encroaching, ever-growing human population, desperate to find food,
to grow crops, to build houses. Chimpanzees, like other animals, are disappearing as hungry people
set up wide snares to catch animals for food, dying slow, painful deaths. The greatest threat to the
chimpanzees and all other animals of the Great Congo Basin, the central area of Africa, is what is
known as the ‘bushmeat trade’ or commercial hunting for food—not hunting to feed hungry people,
not the kind of hunting that people have practised in many parts of the world for hundreds and
hundreds of years living in harmony with the forest.”

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