More on Use of Great Apes in Advertising
February 17, 2009
In 2006, I posted my letter to CareerBuilder.com after seeing their Superbowl TV commercial.
I sent a similar letter to Castrol Motor Oil for their Superbowl commercial this year.
Now, an article entitled “Ape Advocate Cries Foul Over Super Bowl Simians” in the Huffington Post provides some solid background on the issue.
My Superbowl email to CareerBuilder.com
February 5, 2006
I'm a marketing professional and a football fan, and your superbowl commercial not only does not appeal to me–I find it seriously offensive. I am also a director at a 5000+ employee software company. As a result of your commercial, I will never use careerbuilder to find a candidate. Furthermore, I will encourage my HR department to blacklist Careerbuilder companywide.
Your use of chimpanzees as a comedic gimmick is reprehensible. It plays upon and promotes ignorance. Not only are chimpanzees not monkeys–they are apes–but they are humanity's closet relatives. They are, in fact, more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas. More importantly, they are emotional and intelligent, and like all great apes, they are gravely endangered in the wild.
Please redeem yourselves first by abandoning such idiotic abuse of intelligent animals, and second by making some kind of generous contribution to an ape conservation organization.
Scientists Unravel Chimpanzee DNA Sequence
August 31, 2005
Very cool article at livescience.
“We hope that elaborating how few differences separate our species will broaden recognition of our duty to these extraordinary primates that stand as our siblings in the family of life.”
Nice.
Ebu Gogo (again)
May 6, 2005
This one continues to fascinate me: Is the Homo floresensis find actually a new species of human, or a merely a diminutive H. sapiens sapiens?
Carl Zimmer's blog entry on this sheds some light, with a translated article from the Indonesian press, and further enrichment provided in the reader comments.
Zimmer's blogs on this subject are very thorough, so I'll leave the rest to him.
