primates

Videoed work by Tetsuro Matsuzawa shows that "Chimpanzees have a faster working memory than humans according to a remarkable study showing that it takes them a fraction of a second to remember something that it would take several seconds for humans to memorise." Video-link inside article, plus multiple links to this fascinating long-term Japanese study.Will this bring more respect for these creatures whom Spain recently granted legal rights as persons, along with gorillas?

"A Japanese scientist, Tetsuro Matsuzawa has demonstrated the prowess of chimps in remembering in less than half a second the precise position and correct sequence of up to nine numbers on a computer screen.

The numbers are shown together randomly distributed on a computer screen and as soon as the chimps press the number “one” the rest of the numerals are masked. However, they can almost invariably remember where each number was." (The Independent)

The above newspaper article was my first source, but I later found the far more fascinating original scientific site and have updated this article to include it, with excerpts below. The fast working memory video that initially got me interested, turns out to be a mere step in a groundbreaking long term study.

Some of you may recognise the computerized memory tests that the chimpanzee is doing in the video. I have certainly done similar ones on Lumosity. No way I could beat a chimp. I don't know anyone who could. I can easily see how impressive these studies are.

Will this kind of information bring more respect for these creatures whom Spain recently granted legal rights as persons, along with gorillas?

It would be nice to think that the ape in this film, Ai, would not spend her whole life a prisoner and that she might exercise her person-rights to a natural and fitting habitat. There are many photos of Ai and of a large clan of apes in the institute. Whilst they look happy and confident in the photos, I could not at first see whether or not they had access to natural habitat. They do, however, as these and other photos show. http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/en/friends/ai.html They have an outside compound which includes steel climbing towers with balconies overlooking Japanese suburbs.

Here is a link to some fabulous portraits of the apes associated with the laboratory. You can click on most or all of them for biographies of each ape, and more photos. These are certainly fascinating pages. There is even a page of drawings by the institute apes: http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/en/album/the_drawings_by_chimpanzees.html

Ai was born in West Africa, but has a long-time association with Tetsuro Matsuzawa, who has spent a lifetime studying apes, many of them in the wild. Here is another link to more detail about his work. http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/

Matsuzawa is also famous for studying how chimps use tools.
The video below is a charming film about a little ape learning how to use rocks to crack nuts from its mother in the wild.

Read more about Tetsuro Matsuzawa here.

Numerical memory span in a chimpanzee

There is a lot more about chimpanzees and their numerical skills, in work Nobuyuki Kawai and Tetsuro Matsuzawa have done with the same female ape, Ai, who features in the computer exercise at the beginning of this article. Below I have copied and pasted a short commentary from http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/en/publication/KawaiN/Kawai-Matsuzawa_2000_NATURE_Short_memory_span.html

"A female chimpanzee called Ai has learned to use Arabic numerals to represent numbers. She can count from zero to nine items, which she demonstrates by touching the appropriate number on a touch-sensitive monitor2, 3, and she can order the numbers from zero to nine in sequence4, 5, 6. Here we investigate Ai's memory span by testing her skill in these numerical tasks, and find that she can remember the correct sequence of any five numbers selected from the range zero to nine.

Humans can easily memorize strings of codes such as phone numbers and postcodes if they consist of up to seven items, but above this number they find it much harder. This 'magic number 7' effect, as it is known in human information processing7, represents a limit for the number of items that can be handled simultaneously by the brain.

To determine the equivalent 'magic number' in a chimpanzee, we presented our subject with a set of numbers on a screen, say 1, 3, 4, 6 and 9. She had already displayed close to perfect accuracy when required to choose numerals in ascending order, but for this experiment all the remaining numbers were masked by white squares once she had selected the first number. This meant that, in order to be correct in a trial, she had to memorize all the numbers, as well as their respective positions, before making the first response. Chance levels with three, four and five items were 50, 13 and 6%, respectively.

Ai scored more than 90% with four items and about 65% with five items, significantly above chance in each case. In normal background trials, response latency was longest for the first numeral and much shorter for all the others, indicating that Ai inspected the numbers and their locations and planned her actions before making her first choice. In masking trials, response latency increased only for the choice directly after the onset of masking, but this latency was similar to those recorded in background trials, indicating that successful performance did not depend on spending more time memorizing the numbers."

Click on picture to see film. "Knowing these young monkeys would have faced decades of painful experimentation, it was a particularly emotional moment this morning as we loaded them onto the transport truck in preparation for their journey. It was truly a relief to look each one of these incredible creatures in the eyes and make good on my promise: finally taking them into our arms of compassion."Click on picture to see film.

On 15 July 2010 rescuers from the US based In Defense of Animals organisation took 55 macaque monkeys and 118 beagles from a toxicology laboratory in New Jersey where they had recently became "seized assets" when the lab went out of business. The beagles were rescued and the film above shows the removal of the abandoned monkeys to the relative freedom and massively increased, grassy quarters at the animal rescue grounds.

In US laboratories these animals can apparently be confined for their entire lives in tiny cages. I do not know if the law prescribes any exercise, but it does not appear that they ever leave the lab-rooms and that, when they leave their cages, it is for incredibly cruel experiments. Thus the existence of these monkeys would have been a terrifying hell for their whole lives until IDOA was able to rescue them.

The organisation needs money to cover the rescue and asks for donations.

The film shows their 1,700-mile journey to a "new life away from this unfathomable existence in grim cells, with its day-to-day burden of unspeakable cruelty and isolation, to four safe havens in Oklahoma and Texas filled with fresh air, friends, and freedom from harm."

Source of article, a press release from Scotlund Haisley,
President, In Defense of Animals

Introduction:

I find it incongruous - to say the least - to think that the humans are sitting in armchairs watching t.v., driving cars, eating with their partners and children, leading affluent lives on the basis of earnings from the industrialised depravity - nazi-like in its cleanly-institutional style - we see in the video.

Go on, have a look; it's not that kind of video

original photo by Michael Nichols at http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/animals/images/primary/chimp-peeking-through-leaves.jpg

But it's also nothing like the photograph above of a young chimpanzee free in his natural surroundings.

The video does not contain intentional torture. It shows many chimpanzees and monkeys in bare cages with concrete floors, who are kept there for many many years. They are powerless and frightened. Baby chimps are bred there and taken from their mothers for experiments. You don't see the experiments, but you do see the animals restrained and a baby chimp crying as blood is being taken from it or it is being given a drug. You also see animals thrown roughly down on hard operating tables. Most of all you see a great deal of barren cleanliness with living creatures confined like criminals in tiny cells as masked and gowned staff go about 'just following orders' no doubt. One chimp was taken from the wild 25 years ago and has lived in concrete cells since then, apparently.

This situation is a reflection of the hardness of US society where keeping a job requires uncritical subservience. It also reflects the kind of ignorance that many people thought had disappeared with the Victorian era of tiny zoo-cages, or because we have all become 'civilised' in the western world, due to ... ahem... human 'progress'...

Political engagement against dystopia

But, yes, we do live in a world where this is going on all the time for other animals for food production, and the US has something like 7 million human beings confined in prison cells as well. But being surrounded by industrialised cruelty is not an excuse to give up. It is all the more reason to protest - because not to do so depraves us all. When we are all depraved, accepting this as normal, then there is no hope and we have all become part of the machine.

How to register your disgust

Here is a link to a form you can fill in to send automatically to US legislators if you live in the US. Alternatively, you could just look up your US embassy and send them an email with a copy to the US Humane Society, at this email address: humanesociety[AT]hsus.org. I sent a copy of this article to the Melbourne-based US embassy. You might also email a copy to the NIRC itself: NIRCadmin[AT]louisiana.edu

Anyone associated with this research, especially those in charge of it, in my opinion, should be stripped of their assets gained through such unacceptably callous exploitation. We need names and faces to pin to these atrocities. Anonymity is what keeps such practices going.

It would be much harder to condemn the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana if the institution had obviously made a great effort to compensate these animals by giving them trees and a lovely environment between 'sessions'. But they have confined these forest creatures to an environment as friendly as a toilet block for life.

What sort of rectal human phenomena would do such a thing? I simply do not know, but I guess someone emotionally dead and fixated on material survival. Or perhaps someone who actually believes that non-humans have no feelings or worth. Unfortunately a lot of humans have become like that and the rest of us have to try to fix up the damage they do everywhere.

The story is from the Humane Society of the United States, which has a lot more clout than the Australian RSPCA. Supporting them will probably lead to a real improvement in this problem.

Story accompanying the video (informative, not schlocking)

A nine-month-long undercover investigation by The HSUS has exposed the mistreatment of nearly 300 chimpanzees and other primates at the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana. These chimps, living lives of deprivation and misery, are among the more than 1,000 chimps languishing in laboratories across the United States. Chimps, our closet genetic relative, are complex, social, and long-lived creatures. Many chimps currently warehoused in research facilities have lived for decades behind bars. Especially heartbreaking are stories of the 26 elder chimps at NIRC, who were taken from their mothers in the wild.

The Great Ape Protection Act (H.R. 1326) has just been re-introduced in Congress. This legislation aims to end invasive research on the chimpanzees remaining in laboratories, retire the approximately 500 federally-owned chimpanzees to permanent sanctuary (including the elder chimps at NIRC), and make the recent decision by the National Center for Research Resources (part of the National Institutes of Health) to stop funding the breeding of federally-owned chimpanzees permanent.

The United States is the only country, besides Gabon, that still uses chimpanzees in invasive research. The United Kingdom, Japan, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain have all banned or severely restricted the use of chimpanzees. Please help the U.S. join this list of nations by co-sponsoring The Great Ape Protection Act.

Something else you can do - sponsor a chimp via the Jane Goodall program!

The Jane Goodall Institute of Australia has launched a Guardian Program where you are able to:

* become a caretaker of a chimpanzee, an orangutan or a gorilla;
* support the Lwiro Sanctuary in Congo;
* assist their tree planting efforts in Tanzania.

That is a good idea and we need it for koalas and kangaroos (among other victims of human expansion) in Australia as well.