Check out a long piece on bonobos in The New Yorker. Now, I've read a fair amount of Frans de Waal's work, and I think the piece is making him out to be a little more PC than he is. Nevertheless, I am a bit disturbed by the fact that hasn't seen a Bonobo in the wild! I just happened to have missed that assumed that though most of his research was based on captive animals, there must have been some field research supplementing it. No. And de Waal's response it pretty lame:
Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, "Stuck together, bored out of their minds--what is there to do except eat and have sex?" De Waal has argued that, even if captive bonobo behavior is somewhat skewed, it can still be usefully ...
