“Many travelers have seen the drums of the great apes, and some have heard the sounds of their beating and the noise of the wild, weird revelry of these first lords of the jungle, but Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, is, doubtless, the only human being who ever joined in the fierce, mad, intoxicating revel of the Dum-Dum.”
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| In 1971, Joe Kupart depicted Tarzan and one of the evil apes. |
And thus, generations of young boys and girls were pulled
into the false – and amazingly, crudely, racist – narrative of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ seven-foot anthropoids (never called chimpanzees, but distinguished
from gorillas) that use their fangs to literally satisfy their lust for blood. Tarzan of the Apes, pulp fiction written
without a whit of understanding about apes, became a cultural icon and
insinuated itself into the consciousness of an entire century.
No wonder we have so much trouble, today, emerging from the
primitive ignorance of the last hundred years. How Hollywood transformed Burroughs’
evil apes into Johnny
Wiesmuller’s darling little Cheetah, I will never understand, but after
reading Tarzan for the first time
this week I appreciate our generational confusion a little better.
Ape advocates constantly voice/post their anger and frustration at the slow pace of change in American attitudes. The exasperation with people who use chimpanzees and orangutans for amusement and entertainment is palpable… and disbelieving. I have shared that aggravation, often completely baffled, wondering how in the world any decent human can condone the exploitation.
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| Dad kept this photo of Detroit Zoo's Jo Mendi II, one of the chimps he trained. |
But then I glimpse at the photo I have on my wall, of a young
Jo Mendi II, staring from the amphitheater facilities at the Detroit Zoo in 1950 during a training session with my dad. Like millions of children, I was
entranced by the young chimps performing at zoos, in circuses, on local TV
shows. We grew up with a misperception of who they were, what they needed, and,
indeed, how their sad fates led them to life (and premature death) in research labs. Even now, unless a person happens
across a PETA video or a Humane Society website, the adults those kids grew into
probably still harbor false perceptions.
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| Rex Harrison with Chi-Chi on the set of Doctor Doolittle |
Many of us saw the 1967 version of Doctor Doolittle, with Rex Harrison. While we giggled at the
chimpanzee, Chi-Chi, we didn’t realize that trainer Roy Kabat took six months
to train Chi-Chi (and her three stand-ins) to cook bacon and eggs in a frying
pan. Harrison experienced Chi-Chi’s problems personally. He wrote in his autobiography,
A Damned Serious Business: My Life in
Comedy, “I know they say 'never work with children or animals', for fear, I
suppose, of being upstaged by them. But in this case the animals behaved well
in almost all respects – it was the animal trainers who should've been
shot." After describing Chi-Chi as “terribly sweet and affectionate,” he explains
that “suddenly, for no reason at all that I could see, her trainer gave her a
wallop on the head. Poor Chi-Chi was so startled she turned on me, instead of
on the trainer, and started to maul me, scratch me with her claws, and – worse still
– bite me with her teeth.”
The entertainment exploitation of apes has gone on for years and years. (See ChimpCare’s Chimpanzees in Entertainment for many examples of the worst.)
Indeed, the cultural misportrayal of great apes has infused our ignorance for a
century, since Tarzan of the Apes was
first published in 1912. It will take time to eradicate such a deeply embedded misunderstanding
of apes, that has been reinforced by movies and
books and advertisements and zoo shows.
I am as guilty of impatience as anyone. On January 3 last
year, I wrote a blog post hoping that 2012
would be the Year of the Chimpanzee, and I started a “Year of the Chimp” Facebook
page dedicated to it. In the blog, I listed six goals, none of them
achieved -- although the National Institutes of Health made progress on getting
the research chimps closer to retirement in the federal sanctuary
system. One of my goals was to “shine the light on entertainers and marketers
who exploit chimps for product promotions and profit.” It is evident that we
will need to extend our Year of the Chimp through 2013, and so I’ve made that
change to the Facebook page.
Actually, if we are real with ourselves, we will recognize that we
need to extend educational efforts for another 20 years or more. We need to
inform the people of my generation who grew up with
the unadulterated crap of Tarzan and his ilk, unknowingly contributing to the exploitation of great apes.
“What a perfect creature!” Jane thought as she viewed Tarzan for the first time, Burroughs wrote. “There could be naught of cruelty or baseness beneath that godlike exterior. Never, she thought, had such a man strode the earth since God created the first in his own image.”
No wonder we all fell for Tarzan, king of the apes. Godlike!
If only we could emulate the goodness that Burroughs tells us was the “hall-mark
of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine
breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth
and savage training and environment could not eradicate.”
Times have changed. Now, we need truly good Tarzans and Tarzaninas, instead of a godlike fantasy. We need people who will rescue the apes from the
humans, instead of the way Burroughs originally wrote his story… We need to transform Burroughs' manure into compost, to fertilize a new century of thinking.
