For years, productions used chimpanzees as comical fodder in movies like Bedtime for Bonzo, a 1951 production starring Bonzo the chimpanzee and Ronald Reagan. These harmful ape GIFs often originate from a single source: the film industry. Image by Alain Houle via Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY 4.0). Chimpanzees used for captive breeding often give birth every year and have their infants removed from them. In the wild, young chimpanzees stay close to their mothers for years and females typically give birth once every five years. embed/episode/id/21324371Īdult female and infant wild chimpanzee feeding on figs in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Hear this article read aloud via the “Mongabay Reports” podcast, here: “It might just seem like a fun, cute image, but it has a deeper impact,” Jory says. The Jane Goodall Institute estimates that for every baby chimpanzee that is seized for the wildlife trade, up to 10 others may have been killed in the process. Poachers seize baby chimpanzees after killing their mothers. Jessie Jory, outreach and development coordinator for the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, says these types of images could perpetuate the myth that great apes make good pets, fueling the illegal pet trade and creating orphans.Īll species and subspecies of great apes are either endangered or critically endangered, and this is in part due to the pet trade. “What people may think is a chimpanzee smiling is actually a fear grimace.” “They’re being forced to do that,” says Erika Fleury, program director of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance (NAPSA). A quick search for “chimp” on GIPHY yields dozens of such GIFs: chimpanzees wearing human clothing, smoking cigars, navigating a speedboat, walking a dog, playing a xylophone, to name a few.
GIFs are a fun and easy way to communicate via text, and people love them GIF agency Tenor claims to have more than 300 million monthly users and more than 12 billion image searches per month.īut among the GIFs that these popular sites are those of great apes, especially chimpanzees, in unnatural situations.
If you have a phone, you’ve probably sent a GIF, a simple animated image file. You might think it’s cute to text a GIF of a chimpanzee in overalls walking a dog, but behind this seemingly adorable image is a grim truth: “Those animals were beaten and abused into submission to act that way,” says Debbie Metzler, associate director of captive animal law enforcement for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
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