Great apes are our closest living relatives with complex social lives, tool use, and cultural traditions. Their welfare in captivity and in rapidly shrinking wild habitats demands urgent and sustained attention.
Great ape welfare in captivity requires meeting extraordinarily high cognitive, social, and environmental needs. Facilities that house chimpanzees or gorillas must provide large naturalistic enclosures, appropriate complex social groups, and extensive enrichment to prevent psychological deterioration. Even in good facilities, great apes in small enclosures show higher rates of stereotypic behaviour, psychological stress, and reproductive difficulty than wild counterparts. The welfare case for phasing out great ape captivity in inadequate facilities — while providing lifetime care for existing captive individuals in sanctuaries — is ethically compelling. Wild great ape welfare is primarily threatened by deforestation, bushmeat hunting, and disease spillover from human contact. The connection between consumer choices (palm oil, bushmeat consumption) and great ape welfare is direct.