Page 122 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

I imagine the primatologist Frans de Waal regarding Thwaites with avuncular

amusement, thinking here’s a young man who is smart enough to know what a

goat thinks by actually becoming one. de Waal would appreciate the

determination and the semi-scientific pursuit of Thwaites’ impossible dream,

maybe even recognizing aspects of his younger self.

In Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? de Waal does not

mention his personal food preferences, but he does recall some of the most

egregious experiments in his field that have to do with food, or better, lack of

food. Early behaviorists of the Skinner persuasion used food deprivation,

claiming this was the only way to give the experimental apes “purpose in life.” de

Waal wryly observes, “Obviously, this has less to do with methodology and more

to do with ethics.” In any case, the Skinner people left when the sympathetic lab

staff started feeding the animals at night.

de Waal is like your favorite uncle who shows up at Sunday dinner full of

interesting stories about apes and chimps, birds and snakes, humans and others.

He has spent forty some years studying apes. He considers the Great Divide to

be specious because, after all, by most measures, we are beasts. de Waal

believes that humans in any other way than language are not unique; we share

many traits with animals, but unfortunately we still have a need to insist on being

set apart. As an evolutionary cognitive observer, he believes human-animal

difference is, as Darwin famously pointed out, one of degree, not kind.

In his professional life, de Waal has been called a lot of names: “naïve, romantic,

soft, unscientific, anthropomorphic, anecdotal, or just a sloppy thinker for

proposing that primates follow political strategies, reconcile after fights,

empathize with others, or understand the world around them.” He is no fan of

human exceptionalism. Like Haraway, he is an advocate for human empathy as

a way to understand other species. True empathy, he says, is not self-focused

but other-oriented. “Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we