‘Team Ape’ Is Completely Awful

A ctors and actresses aren’t paid to be thoughtful, so perhaps we shouldn’t put too much stock in the stars of the latest Planet of the Apes movie saying that they prefer apes to humans.

But their comments are telling insofar as they reflect a fashionable worldview that is anti-human and, on top of that, apparently completely ignorant about apes.

Asked in a joint interview promoting the film whether they are “team ape” or “team human,” Owen Teague and Freya Allan both confidently said, “Team ape,” citing what humans have done to the planet.

“I dislike humans a lot,” Allan explained. “There are times where you see humans come together and you go, ‘Oh, isn’t this lovely?’ and then there are times you go, ‘I absolutely hate us.’”

It’s not exactly a new insight that human beings are capable of great achievements and great crimes. Still, you’d think our thespians would have a little more appreciation for the species willing to shell out to watch yet another installment of the Planet franchise, making the humans playing the various roles rich, famous, and comfortable.

It sure beats lolling around in the grass enjoying sexual congress out in the open with prodigious numbers of partners, although tastes differ, I guess.

This is not to disparage apes, who are beasts and can’t help behaving as such. They are fascinating and marvelous creatures, but Teague and Allan seem to have a dated understanding of their social dynamics that was widely held prior to serious primate research beginning in the 1960s.

The late great primatologist Frans de Waal, whose 1982 Chimpanzee Politics was so groundbreaking, surely would have a good chuckle over the two devotees of team ape.

What we began to learn decades ago was that chimpanzees weren’t the peace-loving vegetarians of our imagination. Instead, they have incredibly complex social dynamics that include intense competition for dominance. They also can be astonishingly violent, war-like, and expansionist.

The expert Nicholas Newton-Fisher has written of how seeing chimps peacefully interacting among one another can create the perception that “these animals represent some lost Eden, a salvation from the human condition.”

“To watch a full-grown adult male play-wrestle and chase a juvenile or adolescent,” he continues, “it is hard to imagine the callous brutality with which the same male can seize an infant from its mother’s breast, tear into its abdomen with its canines and start feeding on the infant’s intestines while it still lives.”

And to think no one will arrest, prosecute, or jail — or even send to counseling on pre-trial release — such an ape malefactor.

Summarizing an extensive study of chimpanzee violence for the Atlantic, Max Fisher wrote, “The nature of chimpanzee war, in which tribes patrol their own territory and violently annex the territory of other tribes in search of land and resources, is startlingly similar to the warfare that has consistently emerged throughout human history.”

There seems little doubt that if chimps had Panzer divisions, they’d definitely roll, and if they had A-bombs, they’d drop them without hesitation if necessary.

Of course, they don’t. Chimps are clever, but they don’t invent things the way we do, obviously. And this gets to the crux of the anti-human case that Teague and Allan are, um, aping. We’ve created technology that has manipulated our environment and changed the world, especially everything associated with the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath. There have been some downsides, yes, as there is with nearly everything, but the technological revolution has made us wealthier, healthier, and longer-lived.

The truth is that Teague and Allan would no more want to live for a day in the pre–Industrial Revolution 1550s than they’d want to spend 15 minutes alone in a chimpanzee enclosure.

They don’t really know what team they are on, or at least don’t want to admit it to themselves or others, which makes them all too typical 21st-century Western homo sapiens.