Anyone who’s ever dealt with monkeys can tell you they’re pretty much just like us. Macaques have troops of up to a couple hundred individuals with matrilineal inheritance of status. Chimps go to war in a way strongly reminiscent of a lot of human hunter-gatherers. Macaques are little bastards, for sure, and if I had to deal with packs of them running amok trying to break in to my house, as I have in several houses of several people much more dedicated to ahimsa than myself, I would be very strongly tempted to shoot a few, but that doesn’t make them less like us. I’m not saying that they should have full legal rights as humans, but I have some serious reservations about people doing research that involves keeping them isolated in little cages and doing all kinds of surgical procedures on them.
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