Chimps are vicious bastards—but smart

[haggholm]

A chimp in a Swedish zoo has been observed not only to use rocks as weapons by flinging them at zoo visitors that annoy him, but also stockpiling stones and using rocks to break off bits of concrete to use as projectiles. The real significance is that

while many apes have been observed collecting stones for nut cracking or other planning behaviour, it has been unclear whether the ape was doing the work to meet a current or future need: that is, is the ape looking to crack nuts because he is hungry now, or because he expects to be hungry?

Santino's stone-gathering however, is a clear case of planning for the future, [a researcher] said, since the calm manner in which the chimpanzee collected the stones differed from the agitated state in which he later hurled them.

Given all of the above, I also think that Santino is a very appropriate name…

Seriously, though, I find this rather fascinating, and it serves to strengthen my conviction that the difference between human and non-human animals, in intellectual terms, is quantitative, not strictly qualitative. It may be a very great quantitative difference, mind—I’m under no delusion that they’re just like us; but notions that the intelligence of animals has some strict limit where we set up a qualitative criterion to differentiate ourselves from them—such notions have a consistent tendency to fall apart.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"you would have to acknowledge that there would be a vast collateral damage in human lives and suffering that would otherwise be averted"

You have to acknowledge that the same argument, and a much more convincing one, can be applied to the forced use of humans in experimentation. It's more convincing because if we experimented on humans we would get data that are directly relevant to humans and in many cases much more useful in our quest to treat human ailments. A very large fraction of animal use in experiments has no direct link to treatments for human drugs. Therefore your argument doesn't even apply to the majority of animal use in this context.

All of this is beside the actual point! You have yet to address the real issue, which is why do we condemn using humans exclusively as a means to our ends yet we allow such use of non-humans. What, aside from species, makes the use of humans morally unjustified, while the use of other thinking and feeling beings is found to be unproblematic? Distinguishing between sentient beings based on species is the same form of othering that is used in sexism and racism. It's the exclusion of a group based on an irrelevant characteristic. When the question is 'should we cause them harm?' or 'should we use them exclusively for our own ends?' we can not answer in the affirmative based on the colour of their skin, or the nature of their genitals anymore than we can based on the physical manifestation of their DNA.