Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally.
Interpretation
Chimpanzees have distinct personalities that influence their behaviors, and handling them requires understanding rather than personal feelings.
This quote by Frans De Waal emphasizes that chimpanzees, much like humans, exhibit strong individual personalities that affect their likes, dislikes, and behaviors. Successful interactions with them depend on a handler's ability to understand these personality traits without taking the animals' reactions personally, highlighting the importance of empathy and insight into individual differences in relationships.
In practice
In a workshop about animal behavior, this quote can illustrate the necessity of understanding personality in training techniques.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than _x000D_ bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
Nothing will turn a man's home into a castle more quickly and effectively than a dachshund.
Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.
The one joy that has kept me going through life has been the fact that stories unite us. To see you as you listen to me now, as you have always listened to me, is to know this: what I can believe, you can believe. And the way we all see our story-not just as Irish people but as flesh and blood individuals and not the way people tell us to see it-that's what we own, no matter who we are and where we come from.
So think long and hard about who you're spending the most time with, for wherever they are headed, so are you.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.