Bonobo Hope

Bonobos, along with Chimpanzees, are our closest primate relatives, sharing 98% of our DNA.  Their tool-making and tool-using facilities are remarkable.  Kanzi, an adult male bonobo, employing two stones, can chip off from one of them flints similar to those made by our hominid ancestors two million years ago.  He knows how to make a fire, cook marshmallows over it, and douse it on command.  He learned elements of sign language from a film in which a gorilla was being taught it; he learned to communicate with humans via a keyboard with lexograms, by watching largely unsuccessful efforts to teach the system to his adoptive mother; he can understand about 3,000 spoken English words; and he can understand them in novel, complex structures.  He can recognize himself in a mirror. 

I learned about him from a letter requesting donations to the Bonobo Hope Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa.  The sanctuary began as the Great Ape Trust, which in 2004 brought to Des Moines a family of bonobos from George State University, where they had been studied for many years.  The trust, dedicated to “ape welfare, research and education,” was largely funded by a single individual who, for personal reasons, stopped supporting it at the end of last year.  This has precipitated a financial crisis, leading its board of trustees to convert the facility to a sanctuary that would be open to the public. 

The sanctuary needs to raise enough money to cover the salaries of a bare-bones staff and to maintain the grounds while it earns the corporate and local support that will “stabilize the center’s transition and…begin the process of opening it up to the people of Des Moines.”  After that, the center will seek grants for ape-centered research.  You can read about the Bonobo Hope Sanctuary and about some of the research that has been conducted with bonobos at http://bonobohope.org.

I was particularly moved by the assertion, in the letter requesting support, that “Kanzi and [his sister] Panbanisha have shown that, like us, they reflect on who they are and what will happen to them.”  Research with these bonobos has shown us that characteristics we once thought exclusively human are possessed by apes, if to a lesser degree, raising anew the question of what it means to be human.  If it were not too late in life to embark on a second career, I would try to become a primatologist.


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