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Update on Chimpanzees in Entertainment
June 20, 2011
There have been a few developments recently pertaining to the use of chimpanzees in the entertainment industry since our last alerts concerning CareerBuilder's choice to exploit chimpanzees once again, and conversely Capital One's decision to remove a commercial that featured a chimpanzee.
First, with the bad news—unfortunately, Steven Tyler aired a music video for his new solo album on May 11's episode of American Idol. The video featured a whole slew of animals, including a chimpanzee uncomfortably rocking toward the beginning. Music videos are short-lived and not distributed uniformly, so they tend to be fairly resistant to any concerns from animal advocates and experts. So, consequently, we don't have a contact for you to write letters to at the moment regarding Tyler's music video—but please do spread the word. Avoid purchasing his new solo album, and ask your friends to do the same.
In other news, Canada's CMT network was planning to start a series called Chimp Mommy, which is premised on following the life of a woman taking care of an infant chimpanzee in her house.
As infants, chimpanzees are affectionate, playful, and irresistibly cute. For this reason, people will buy them from breeders to keep as pets. Sadly, chimpanzees that are put into human households as pets are taken away from their mothers at birth, causing irreversible psychological harm. As they grow older, chimpanzees become too strong and unmanageable to be dominated by their owners. It is within chimpanzee nature to be physically aggressive, and they can and will bite. Many chimpanzee owners have lost fingers and suffered severe facial damage. Once they become destructive and dangerous, chimpanzees can no longer live in a human household so they are inevitably condemned to a life of imprisonment. Often ex-pet chimpanzees are cast off to a shoddy roadside zoo or other substandard facility. Chimpanzees can live to be in their 60s, so this kind of treatment means a long life of misery for them.
These issues were discussed with Corus Entertainment Group (CMT Canada's parent company) with concerns that the show would be a skewed portrayal of the industry of privately owned chimpanzees. Thankfully, they were very responsive to hearing these concerns and decided to only air the first two episodes that had already been filmed.
If you follow our page on Facebook, you might have seen a link to an article from AdWeek describing a new and inventive technique by BBDO for educating advertisers about the pligh t of entertainment chimpanzees. Read about it here.
You may have also seen the announcement about Rise of the Planet of the Apes—the new Planet of the Apes movie that is scheduled to release this August. Unlike the last movie from 2001, this film does NOT feature live primate actors! The producers shot some footage of chimpanzees in zoos, recorded vocalizations from sanctuary chimpanzees, and used (really incredible) computer-generated images. Check out the trailer here.
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