“Project Nim”

But, the syntheses that emerge from their conflicts, the compromise solutions, are often better than either side alone. So, chalk one up for Hegel.
For example, we’ve learned an important lesson from the animal rights movement: don’t import more chimps. Moreover, Americans shouldn’t breed more chimps to use in entertainment. Young ones can be amazingly entertaining, but they live a long, long time, and the older they get, the cuter they ain’t. (That line, which I use a lot, is from one of my favorite Simpsons’ scripts, Lisa’s First Word by Jeff Martin.)

The full cost of caring for a chimp over a typical lifespan of maybe 40 or more years is huge. Don’t let private organizations privatize profits from chimps while socializing the costs they impose in the long run. (Funny how a lot of lessons learned from chimps can be applied more broadly.)
In medical research, don’t make chimps your automatic first choice. They often turn out to be of less use as human stand-ins than they would appear. For example, a lot were bred for AIDS research, but then it turned out that chimps infected with HIV rarely developed AIDS.

And they are gigantic amounts of work. For example, because they are miniature King Kongs who will rip your face off, Jim, you can’t, say, take blood from them without first shooting them with a tranquilizing dart gun.
White rats are often a lot better choice outside of a few disease like hepatitis where chimps are valuable.