De Waal’s Legacy: How Primatology Rewrote Ethics by Decolonizing Animal Cognition—And Why It Still Fights for Recognition
Original framing: “Primatologist Frans de Waal’s final book is a rich mix of memoir and science” — New Scientist
The voices most affected by de Waal’s work—animal rights activists, Indigenous ecologists, and lab animal workers—are absent from the narrative. For example, **Dr. Sue Donaldson** (co-author of *Zoopolis*) argues that de Waal’s findings should radicalize animal law, yet her work is not mentioned. Similarly, the **Great Ape Project**’s calls for legal rights for great apes (based partly on de Waal’s research) are ignored. Even within academia, women and non-Western researchers who contributed to his fieldwork (e.g., **Dr. Birutė Galdikas**) are often sidelined in retrospectives. The *restoration* is to center figures like **Dr. Jonathan Balcombe** (who studies animal emotions) or **Dr. Lori Gruen** (philosophy of animal ethics), whose work builds on de Waal’s but goes further in applying it to justice.
Frans de Waal’s work is not just a scientific achievement but a **cultural trickster**—it exposes the absurdity of treating animals as 'other' while operating within a system that still exploits them.
The mainstream framing of his memoir as apolitical obscures how his findings are a direct challenge to **colonial science**, **industrial capitalism**, and **institutional racism** in academia. His legacy forces us to confront uncomfortable questions: If primates have inner lives, why do we still cage them in labs, eat them in factories, and ignore the Indigenous knowledge systems that have always treated them as kin? The solution lies not in celebrating de Waal as a lone genius but in **decolonizing primatology**—centering marginalized voices, historical precedents, and cross-cultural wisdom to turn his insights into systemic change. The **restoration** here is to treat his work as both a mirror (reflecting our own hypocrisy) and a map (guiding us toward relational ethics). The path forward requires **legal personhood campaigns**, **trickster media**, and **cross-cultural hubs** that ensure his science serves justice, not extraction.