Chimpanzees May Recognize Emotions in Others

10/28/2013

Ninety-eight percent of a chimpanzee's DNA is identical to that of humans.

Hello there, and welcome to As It Is from VOA Learning English!

I’m Christopher Cruise in Washington.

Today we have news -- a lot of news -- about chimpanzees.

A new study has found that as chimpanzees grow, they can recognize emotions in other creatures, including human beings! We will hear from one of the researchers who led the study, which involved the act of yawning.

Pippo, a chimpanzee, enjoys iced food at a zoo in Rome as temperatures reached 35 degrees Celsius in July

“Some people have looked at adult chimps and have shown them cartoons of other chimps yawning, and that sets off their yawning as well. The stimulus -- the yawn stimulus -- can be very simple and still set off a yawn.”

Also today, we hear about a study earlier this year that showed chimpanzees, like people, share a sense of fair play.

And we report on plans by America’s National Institutes of Health to end medical research on most of the chimps it owns.

“Americans have benefited greatly from the chimpanzees’ service to biomedical research, but new scientific methods and technologies have rendered their use in research largely unnecessary.”

World renowned primate expert Jane Goodall believes using chimpanzees in medical research is "morally wrong and unacceptable".