CareerBuilder: Stop using chimpanzees in Super Bowl ads
CareerBuilder is hurting chimpanzees, both captive and wild, with their irresponsible exploitation of chimps in their marketing campaigns over the years.
The Super Bowl ads are a sad testament to corporate insentience about our sentient cousins. “No chimps were beaten during the filming of this ad,” proclaims the company public relations person. No, of course not. That happens before ads are taped, and after the lights are turned off.
While CareerBuilder scorns the expert opinions of primatologists and the concerns of animal advocates everywhere, responsible companies are listening. Pfizer created an innovative ad campaign for Robitussin, using a computer generated image of an orangutan. Which company - Pfizer or CareerBuilder - is smart and forward looking, and which one is mired in the yuck-yucks of the 1950s and ’60s when people thought it was funny to make apes do stupid tricks?
By using live chimpanzees for advertising, CareerBuilder supports an industry that hurts the chimps from the beginning of their lives when they are forcibly taken away from their mothers, through their youthful isolation and often abusive training, to their final 40 or 50 years when they are discarded into sanctuaries without financial support. In fact, the young chimpanzees used in CareerBuilder’s first commercial (yes, they’ve been doing this for years) are now at Center for Great Apes, a sanctuary in Florida - with no support from CareerBuilder.
Beyond the hurt done to these specific chimps, a public who laughs at zany and unnatural antics of costumed chimps is less likely to understand that chimpanzees are an endangered species that need protection. This has been explained to CareerBuilder, to no effect.
In refusing to stop their use of chimpanzees, CareerBuilder is inflicting tremendous harm on the captive chimpanzees they’ve used in the past and the chimps they are using now. And they are deliberately and knowingly interfering with the conservation education that must take place if we are to save the remaining chimpanzees in the wild.
