Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Quotes

To fail to try to understand the world from the point of view of the lion or the bat is to admit that the human existence is so limited that it cannot project itself satisfactorily into the minds of different creatures. Do we really want to accept this limitation when we quite satisfactorily project ourselves into all sorts of invented imaginary creatures, even those with very different sensory systems and value systems than our own? All one need do is to read a few comic books to conclude that the projection abilities of our species are great indeed and that our children, at least, have little difficulty in going beyond their ordinary frameworks of reality.

We have a lot to learn from [bonobos], because they're a very egalitarian society and they're a very empathetic society. Sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they set aside. It permeates their entire life.

Engagement, and its relationship to the accumulation and processing of information, is a little-studied phenomenon, representing as it does, individual skills rather than those that can be measured in a group of people. Currently, our understanding and measurement of human intellectual capacity is oriented toward group skills and toward activities that can be elicited on command, regardless of the state of engagement. Indeed, being able to engage one's focus on the questions of the examiner, rather than on one's own interest, is the primary measure of test-taking ability, and test-taking ability is the primary measure of intelligence. When we find that animals do not do well when compared to people in this way, we must not assume that we have really measured their intellect. Perhaps we have measured only our own limited ability to engage them.

I'm in the role of helping these apes negotiate the human role. I'm just a temporary intermediary in what I think will be eventual communication between the two species.

We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.