"Cute" Chimps in Ads May Harm Species' Survival
"We were testing the argument that the entertainment industry has made that exposure to chimpanzees in human settings makes people more sympathetic to their plight," said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke. "In fact, the opposite is true. We found people became less concerned about the risks chimpanzees face after they'd seen the entertainment clips."(This observation is treated in greater depth on Science 2.0 at Why Chimpanzees Should Not Be In The Entertainment Industry.)
In Britain, there was a well-known series of advertisements for PG Tips tea sold by Brooke Bond, featuring the Brooke Bond Chimps. Some of them featured a Chimp super-spy — “My name is Bond – Booke Bond!” There were many others, though. Here one of the best-known episodes:
Edward Heath was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974. His best known recreational activity was sailing a yacht called Morning Cloud. There briefly appeared an episode with the Chimps sailing a yacht called Morning Tea, but this was quickly withdrawn.
In the United Kingdom, Devolution refers to the statutory granting of powers from the Parliament of the United Kingdom to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly and to their associated executive bodies the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive.
During the time of Scottish Devolution, I thought of sharing on the web the idea of a descendant of Charles Darwin stumbling on a film set in the Scottish glens, where they would be making a Brooke Bond advertisement featuring tartan-clad chimps. He would exclaim “I say, that’s taking devolution a bit far!”
I refrained, though, thinking it might not be a politically constructive thing to do. (And, in the light of subsequent developments, one wonders if in fact the Scots have been “making monkeys out of” the English.)
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