Going Ape: Bonobos for Peace

Going Ape: Bonobos for Peace

Chimpanzees live in violent, patriarchal societies where war and infanticide occur on an everyday basis. It is widely accepted that they are our evolutionary next-of-kin. What many of us aren’t aware of, however, is that we are just as closely related to bonobo apes— creatures that may hold the key to world peace, according to an article researcher Vanessa Woods recently penned for Psychology Today.

“I'll tell you this: I would swap every gadget I own - my car, my laptop, the potential to fly to the moon - if I could wake up as a bonobo,” says Woods. Bonobos do not have war— the apes would literally rather make love. No bonobo has ever been seen to kill another bonobo. Their societies are peaceful and matriarchal, with the females working together for the community. Kanzi, a 26-year-old male bonobo, is even reputedly able to converse with humans through what linguists call ‘proto-grammar.’

And yet, according to Woods, 75% of people have no idea what a bonobo is. Her book, Bonobo Handshake, will be the first book published on the topic in 13 years. When comparing this to the 380 books published on mosquitoes alone, it’s difficult to challenge her contention that the media has been trying very hard to pretend that bonobos don’t exist.

“Like an embarrassing relative, bonobos are frequently missing from the family tree,” she says. And according to Microsoft Word’s spell-check, bonobo isn’t even a word. Our squeamishness, she believes, can be contributed to a combination of factors: bonobos often show homosexual tendencies, they live in a female-dominated society, and they share 98.7% of our DNA. Any one of these facts would be enough to make a right wing journalist squirm.

Recently, New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has been considering accepting tax funding from NASA to conduct experiments which would involve blasting squirrel monkeys with harmful doses of radiation and subjecting them to behavioural experiments in order to closely observe the damage that space radiation could cause in humans. According to PETA, similar experiments have caused monkeys to develop cataracts, cognitive deficits, brain tumours, and other serious medical problems. The European Space Agency has publicly criticized the use of monkeys in these experiments.

And rightly so, you may say. Is it rational to always align ourselves with the violence of chimpanzees, when we have a peaceful alternative in the animal kingdom to learn from? “If we can use hummingbird flight to make helicopters and cat's eyes to make reflector lights,” asks Woods, “why can't we use bonobos to make peace on earth?” Instead of furthering the suffering of primates, surely we can learn from the nonviolent ways of the bonobos.

Stephanie Davies