These magnificent species of Africa - elephants, rhino, lions, leopards, cheetah, the great apes (Africa has four of the world's five great apes) - this is a treasure for all humanity, and they are not for sale. They are not for trade. They need to be valued and preserved by humanity. We all need a global commitment to that.
Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
Nothing is more important than saving ... the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.
I am on my way to Ghana tomorrow morning and you just need to know that this Administration is very focused on doing all we can to promote economic development in this part of the world, in Africa, throughout Africa, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.
What I thought was so great about Rise [of the Planet of the Apes ] was that it wasn't a retelling; it was an entering of the universe at a different point. So it's Planet of the Apes. We already know the ending. There's no mystery in that! It becomes Planet of the Apes. So it's not about what is at the end; it's about how did we get there? And that enabled something that was totally fresh, which was an ape-point-of-view movie.
...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?
Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.
The final objective is not to distribute the migrants among various European countries but to prevent them from entering Europe and from departing from Africa. We need to intervene in Africa. We need to have a Marshall Plan for Africa to improve living conditions in the countries of origin.
After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade and the Arabs were in the slave trade before Islam and they are still in the slave trade.
The illegal wildlife trade threatens not only the survival of entire species, such as elephants and rhinos, but also the livelihoods and, often, the very lives of millions of people across Africa who depend on tourism for a living.
When I was in government, the South African economy was growing at 4.5% - 5%. But then came the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, and so the global economy shrunk. That hit South Africa very hard, because then the export markets shrunk, and that includes China, which has become one of the main trade partners with South Africa. Also, the slowdown in the Chinese economy affected South Africa. The result was that during that whole period, South Africa lost something like a million jobs because of external factors.
He ["the male"] is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than apes, because he is, first of all, capable of a large array of negative feelings that the apes aren't - hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, disgrace, doubt - and, secondly, he is aware of what he is and isn't.
There's a place in Botswana where there are 100,000 elephants living in a single population. Think of the amount of space they need. Remember, the United States would fit in Africa three times over and there would still be space. That's how big Africa is.
I love Africa in general South Africa and West Africa, they are both great countries.