Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[jasonlulu_2000]

Not long ago, I spent the morning having coffee with Kanzi. Kanzi is a fellow of few words � 384 of them by formal count, though he probably knows dozens more. He has a very clear, very expressive and very loud voice, but it's not especially good for forming words, which is the way of things when you're a bonobo, the close and more peaceable cousin of the chimpanzee.
But Kanzi is talkative all the same. He keeps a sort of vocabulary close at hand� three laminated sheets filled with hundreds of colorful symbols that represent all the words he's been taught or picked up on his own. He can build thoughts and sentences, all by pointing.
Kanzi knows the value of breaking the ice. So he points to the coffee symbol on his vocabulary and then points to me. He then sweeps his arm wider, taking in Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, an investigator at the Great Ape Trust and lab supervisor Tyler Romine. Romine fetches four coffees, takes one to Kanzi and then rejoins us. Kanzi sips and, since our voices are picked up by microphones, he listens as we talk.
"He's been stubborn this morning," Savage-Rumbaugh tells me, "and we couldn't get him to come out to the yard. So we had to negotiate a piece of honeydew melon in exchange." Honeydew is not yet on Kanzi's word list; instead, he points to the green watermelon.
Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our laborers. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them. Our dodge has always been that animals are ours to do with as we please simply because they don't suffer the way we do. They don't think, not in any meaningful way.
But one by one, the berms we've built between ourselves and the beasts are being washed away. Humans are the only animals that use tools, we used to say. But what about the birds and apes that we now know do as well? And as for humans as the only beasts with language? Kanzi himself could tell you that's not true.
All of that is forcing us to look at animals in a new way. It's not enough to study an animal's brain; we need to know its mind.

Can you paraphrase the above underlined sentences in a simpler way?

Thanks

[redset]

He has a very clear, very expressive and very loud voice, but it's not especially good for forming words, which is the way of things when you're a bonobo.

A bonobo is a kind of ape. His voice is very loud, very clear and very expressive, but he doesn't have the kind of control you need to form human words. This is how things are for bonobos (it's physically hard for them to make the right sounds).


Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts.

Humans and animals have a complicated and uneasy relationship.


Our dodge has always been that animals are ours to do with as we please simply because they don't suffer the way we do. They don't think, not in any meaningful way.

We avoid the difficult questions by using this excuse: animals don't suffer the way we do, they don't really think and understand the world (so they don't, for example, understand their lack of freedom, their being used to do work for us, or the fact that their kind are killed and used as food by humans. Humans would feel very differently about these things happening to themselves).


The article is basically about our ethics and morals, and how we think of animals as completely different to humans - which is a convenient excuse for our treatment of animals. The more we learn about animals, the more we find they're really not as different to us as we'd like to think, and we humans aren't really in some special category where different rules apply!