This website is a repository for the filmed testimonies of individuals who experienced significant encounters with non-human apes. We wish to include a large array of testimonies, with people from all walks of life. Experiences with great apes could occur in very different contexts: in captive or semi-captive settings or in the traditional habitats of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans.
We began collecting testimonies in March 2018. For practical reasons, most of our participants so far have been located in the US, Europe and the Middle East, and many of them are academics, but we are committed to diversity in terms of opinion, background, and national origin. As we currently reach the end of phase two–the creation of this website–, we intend to expand our inquiry in the future and are particularly interested in acquiring testimonies from people who lived with great apes in Sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia.
Because this website is an archive documenting life experiences across the species barrier, we consider it crucial to include opinions we may disagree with—and also to collect and edit our testimonies in a respectful manner toward those who accepted to partake in this initiative. The views expressed by the interviewees are their own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Ape Testimony Project and of the individuals or organizations associated with this initiative.
In particular, the Ape Testimony Project does not condone the private ownership of chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, or bonobos. In fact, we are favorable to settings that would allow for the highest level of self-determination for populations of great apes. Such places should ensure the biological conservation of species, but also provide for a conservation of primate cultures that are routinely depleted in captive environments as well as starkly diminished by human encroachment in the “wild.” They should also enact an open comprehension of the affective needs of Pan, Pongo or Gorilla. Moreover, while conservation is key, we should do everything we can to allow ape populations to potentially to develop into new directions, as neither behavior nor culture are fixed entities. Thus, and quite regrettably, it should be made clear that the settings we could dream of are currently nowhere to be found in the West, and not even in the traditional habitat in both Africa and Asia, as they are now severely threatened.
In such–less than ideal–conditions, we cannot assess the present situation of both captive and non-captive apes without paying close attention to the specific environments affecting their physiological and psychological well-being as well as their material and symbolic cultures. For us, preconceptions about “the natural behavior” of an orangutan or the innate tendencies of a chimpanzees are insufficient. The Ape Testimony Project equally opposes all reified ideas of what “an animal” or “an ape” do and should be, and it is at odds with the consensual but limited understanding of the mental capacities of great apes. But, as this project is about building an archive of necessarily contradictory practices and approaches, we have made room—and will continue to make room—for perspectives that are not aligned with ours. Only from such a democratic principle can we find a way to foster dialogue on important, and ultimately political, issues.
By showing the multitude and complexity of the subjective rapports established between members of the five great ape species (humans included), this project seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of our own relations to our other animal selves. It is certainly our hope that, at some point in time, this archive could include testimonies that would be given by the few great apes who, as the bonobo Kanzi, have been allowed to interact with Homo sapiens through the use of verbal and symbolic communication.