We the undersigned, urge you to stop the use of great apes in entertainment.
Great apes are our closest living relatives. We share as much as 99% of our DNA with them. They experience all the same emotions that we do. They feel fear, sadness, anger, happiness, and the most human emotion of all, empathy. Chimpanzees and other great apes used in entertainment are taken away from their mother within days of birth. In the wild great apes share strong bonds with their mother often lasting years. Separating a mother and child leaves lasting scars for both apes involved. This would be like taking a human child away from her mother. While training, great apes are often hit, kicked, beaten and electrocuted to get them to perform. They are confined to a 5’ by 5’ by 7’ cage. That would be like keeping a grown man in a 7’ by 7’ by 11’ cage. Experts agree there is no humane way to train an ape. You cannot use positive reinforcement to make an ape behave. By nature they are mischievous animals. The only way to make them behave as an “actor” is to instill fear in them. These techniques are contrary to the myth of Humane Training. The American Humane Association guidelines for caring for apes on a movie set consist of half a page of vague suggestions. The guidelines leave most of the decisions such as to what the apes do, props that are used, and how long the ape’s work left up to the animal handler. This may well be the same animal handler that brutally trained the apes. If the producer wants to do something that may be dangerous to the ape, the animal handler would be hard pressed to argue for the sake of the ape. The American Humane Association rarely enforces these guidelines. In the 1978 film, Every Which Way But Loose, animal handlers beat an orangutan by the name of Buddha to death after getting into some donuts left on set. These guidelines are not enforced during the filming of television commercials or shows. Nor do they exist beyond the movie set or the borders of the United States, and there are no laws regarding training methods. By the time apes reach sexual maturity they will be much too strong for a human to safely handle. They will either be sold to a lab where they will be used as a test subject or to a road side zoo where they will spend the next 50 to 60 years in isolation in substandard living conditions. Sanctuaries often don’t have room to take more apes. Some people think that no animals should be used for entertainment but it is especially traumatic to use chimpanzees and orangutans in entertainment. Apes are wild animals and should be treated as such. Please do the right thing and stop the abuse of chimpanzees and orangutans in the entertainment industry.