Last week I had the pleasure of attending a meeting that was more focused on "Humans and other apes: Rethinking the species interface". At this gathering, supported by the Arcus Foundation, an organization concerned with social justice and conservation issues, my colleagues and I were specifically concerned with relationships between humans and other great apes and what we can do to protect these amazing beings from further exploitation by humans in captivity and in the wild (there are about 1000 chimpanzees languishing in laboratories in the United States). The timing of this meeting couldn't have been better, what with the recent appearance of book on ethics and animals, a new journal devoted to this topic, the opening of new movies focusing on chimpanzees, "Project Nim" and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes", and a public workshop on the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral research held in Washington, D. C (see also). 

While it's too early to know if and how new books, journals, and movies will be able to help the dire situation of captive chimpanzees and other animals they all make it very clear that these great apes are intelligent and deeply emotional beings and that they care very much about what happens to them, just as we care about what happens to us. They surely need much more protection in the horrific conditions of captivity in which they're kept and in the wild where individuals are unrelentingly killed and their habitats decimated. Concerning the workshop on the use of chimpanzees in research, support for ending the use of chimpanzees in "traumatic and invasive research" came from many different corners including Roscoe G. Bartlett, a republican representative from Maryland and a former physiologist at the Navy's School of Aviation Medicine. In an essay in the New York Times Representative Bartlett concluded, "Americans can longer justifying confining these magnificent and innocent animals to traumatic and invasive research and life imprisonment." As the world famous scientist Carl Sagan once asked, "How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? Indeed how smart would any animal have to be?"

At the Arcus Foundation's meeting my colleagues and I talked about a wide variety of issues in a daunting array of animals (ants to great apes) ranging from ethical concerns centering on the use of animals in research, deeply philosophical issues (see also) including personhood, legal issues, the keeping of animals in other captive situations, animal behavior, cognitive ethology (the study of animal minds; see also), the emotional and moral lives of animals, human-animal interactions in various areas of the world, ethnoprimatology (see also and), conservation biology and conservation psychology, how we can expand our compassion footprint for animals, including humans, our uniquely destructive ways, and compassionate conservation. While there were differing views, as might be expected when people get together to discuss the broad and challenging issues concerned with human-animal interactions, we all agreed that much can be done to improve the lives of chimpanzees and of course other animals and that it is essential to understand the gaps in our knowledge and how we can and must overcome the barriers to communicating our and other's concerns to a wide audience, outside of the ivory tower. Human exceptionalism and speciesism (see also and) were on the table for frank and open discussions. If one is so bold as to attempt to draw lines between different species, it's clear that the borders are extremely fuzzy and ever changing.