Become as knowledgeable as possible.

I always loved animals. And when I was ten, I decided I had to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them.

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

Just think of the trust that often exists in soldiers. Within their own unit, you could say they have to trust each other. A spirit of camaraderie builds up and, in the end, they will risk their lives for each other. They may even go so far as to dehumanise the other, enemy group - a mechanism you can also observe in chimps.

Researchers find it very necessary to keep blinkers on. They don't want to admit that the animals they are working with have feelings.

I shouldn't have named the chimps. It wasn't scientific. I didn't know. I knew nothing. And worse sin of all was that I was ascribing to them emotions like happiness, sadness and so forth.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.