Sad news this week from Dublin Zoo, where the death was announced of the oldest living chimpanzee in human care (or, if you prefer, human captivity). Betty, who was 62, was euthanised because age-related conditions such as chronic arthritis and declining kidney function were making her life a misery.
Reports of Betty’s demise harked back to the days when residents of the zoo were expected to do a bit more than just sit around picking ticks out of each other’s orifices. Betty had been a fixture at the chimp tea parties that were a feature of the visitor experience until the 1970s.
The popular practice of dressing up large primates in hats, pinafores and suits and putting them around a table in a simulacrum of a genteel afternoon tea party was a form of public entertainment that originated at London Zoo in 1926 and spread widely in the following decades, reaching its apotheosis in the long-running TV ads for PG Tips tea, which began in the 1950s.
[ Oldest chimp in human care dies at Dublin ZooOpens in new window ]
It gradually fell out of favour under pressure from animal-rights campaigners, along with a growing awareness of other unwholesome subtexts of race and class lurking barely below the surface. But it did reflect a recurring human impulse to anthropomorphise other species, especially ones with which we have close social relationships (I’m looking at you, dogs and horses) or which are our closest genetic relatives. With the arrival of computer-generated imagery, an entire dubious industry of training animals to do all sorts of ridiculous things for our amusement has gone into apparently irreversible decline.
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Ninety-five per cent of human DNA is identical to chimpanzee DNA, meaning we are as closely related to chimps as the horse is to the zebra, so it’s hardly surprising that we seek a reflection of ourselves in their behaviour. At what point, though, does that become disconnected from the reality of what it actually means to be a chimpanzee?
Some newspaper reports this week bore a strong resemblance to human obituaries, with zookeeper Helen Clarke Bennett telling The Irish Times that Betty was “always strong-minded and would be persistent in getting what she wanted”.
Olivia Kelleher’s article went on to inform us that Betty, “who had many chimpanzee companions, also took it upon herself to protect the group leader Austin’s son Bossou after his mother, Kaylie, died when he was just five years old”. Clarke Bennett said that in recent years when she visited Betty, the elderly chimpanzee “could still be observed wrestling and grooming” with Austin and Bossou.
“Despite her clear affection for both of them, she still dominated all feeding times and was allowed to take the choice items, because if she didn’t get her way she would show her dissatisfaction by screeching at the other two.”
Experienced obituary readers will immediately pick up several telltale circumlocutions. The phrase “did not suffer fools gladly” was traditionally understood to mean that the person was a monstrous sociopath; in less enlightened times the phrase “confirmed bachelor” indicated someone whose orientation was not confined to the heterosexual straight and narrow. It’s clear that Betty did not suffer fools gladly. She was a terrifying matriarch and bully, albeit one capable of some affection and tenderness towards her social underlings.
[ Lessons for life: A meditation on the merits of a good obituaryOpens in new window ]
Or is all this just imposing human social expectations on a species that has its own codes and behaviours? More intriguing is the reference to her “many chimpanzee companions”. Is that a coy suggestion about Betty’s sexual appetites? And, if so, to what are they being compared?
With Betty’s death, a link is lost to a now highly unfashionable conception of the function of zoos, which, rather like Lord Reith’s BBC, were supposed to “inform, educate and entertain”. Tea parties and elephant rides may be a thing of the past, but critics will say that they were merely evidence of something that remains true: these institutions exploit animals for human gratification.
There are of course counterarguments: the western chimpanzee is an endangered species, with only a few hundred thousand left in the wild. Zoos have an important role to play in the fight against the mass extinctions occurring across the planet.
Whichever of these is true – it’s probably a bit of both – the human impulse to think of other animals as mirrors of ourselves runs very deep, even if we don’t train them to pour cups of tea and eat jam sandwiches any more.
