Chimpanzee learns how to recycle

As part of NTV’s “eco week” gimmick, chimpanzee pan-kun was taught how to properly dispose of a plastic bottle*:

Trash disposal rules differ greatly by locality in Japan, so not all places require you to throw away plastic bottles, bottle labels, and caps in the way shown in the clip.

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5 comments - What do you think? Posted by James - June 9, 2009 at 6:22 am

Categories: Animal Videos Tags: pan

Marcello

If you can teach a Chimp to recycle in 2 minutes, why is it so hard to teach the rest of the world?

LB

Probably because chimps, for all their intelligence and “human-ness” (in both the good and bad senses of that phrase) lack the ability to think abstractly. Chimps cannot understand or be taught the concept of “why”. If there is a clear and tangible benefit to doing something, they will do it. If not, they probably won’t. Give Pan-kun a treat and he will sort the garbage – but he can’t weigh whether the work is worth the reward, nor can he ponder whether the work he is doing is causing someone else more work, is good for the planet or not, or is in the long run energy efficient or not. That is a lot of variables and abstractions, and so far only humans have shown capable of considering such problems.

http://www.hormel.com Vonskippy

Probably because Pan-kun does what he’s taught to do, and most humans have already figured out that all the reasons to recycle are mostly bogus.
Richard

I’m reminded of a Penn and Teller show where they were timing people as they separated their trash into half a dozen multicolored bins.
http://www.zdwonline.de Haf

When I lived in Japan, my dormitory had about seven or eight different bins, they even distinguished between sorts of paper. Really crazy.

Also, I don’t really get the necessity(?) to remove the label and the cap from the bottle and throw them into a different bin, as shown in the clip.

In Germany, there are also differences between cities. Where my parents live, there is a yellow bin for plastics and metal and similar things, a green bin for paper-based trash, a bio-bin for compostable things and leftovers and a grey/black bin for “the rest”.
In my city, the green and yellow bin are one and the same, so it’S easier to sort things, yay.

Chimpanzee learns how to recycle

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