Frances Bartkowski's Apes R Us

Frances Bartkowski’s “Apes ‘r Us,” is an essay showcasing how our treatment and relationships with animals says a lot more about us then it does about them. Humans create these boundaries between themselves and animals and through these boundaries we draw out our differences and we make of them the portraits we desire and deny. Current literature, in areas such as cross-species medical technologies, transgenic identities, and other chimeric beings, is growing rapidly and forcing us to rethink the traditional epistemological categories. Given new information, that the men and women in primatology have brought forth for our consideration, it has forced scholars to think far beyond their own fields of study. This branching out is necessary to …show more content…
Human beings have always tried to compare themselves to other species, as if it helped to assert their dominance, and have tried to set themselves apart as the only intelligent being. This is something that humanity has always done and we should evolve past it. As Bartkowski is stating throughout her essay we need to branch out into different fields of study and put together the missing pieces that connect us to the other beings that we share the planet with. Frans de Waal published a series of lectures in 2004 in the publication “Primates and philosophers” along with other critiques of ethics and empathy across species differences. He called for “intellectual breathing room”(60) which is gained by assuming that “ instead of empathy being an endpoint, it may have been the starting …show more content…
Sure we are always searching for new species, but we don't truly understand the current species we have already documented. We have lost that spark to really connect and understand primates, and all animal species. We view ourselves as better than and it is clear in our inhumane treatment of animals in establishments such as factory farms and destruction of habitat simply for profit. Bartkowski states that “What I think we have seen since in some quarters, and always need to welcome in profusion, is the rebirth of curiosity—a motivation force that comes from the sense that we do not have all the answers and that, in fact what moves us along into the future are the questions we pose. Curiosity is certainly a faculty we share across species boundaries, and if fuelled by the energy withdrawn from irony and the wisdom culled from earnestness, it could lead us to break through some epistemological