Naked Ape author Desmond Morris,  98,  helped to shape AR movement

(Beth Clifton collage)

Desmond Morris’ ideas helped to form “animal rights” arguments,  but Morris stood apart from the cause

LONDON,  U.K.––Naked Ape author Desmond Morris,  98,  an influence upon and fellow traveler with the animal rights movement for much of his life,  but at odds with vegans and vegetarians,  died on April 19,  2026,  in Naas, County Kildare,  Ireland.

Desmond Morris had lived with his son Jason and Jason’s family since his wife of 66 years,  the former Ramona Baulch,  died in 2018.

Remembered BBC obituarist Sam Woodhouse,  “Desmond John Morris was born on January 24,  1928 in the village of Purton,  near Swindon,”  in southwest England between Oxford and Bath.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Influenced by war fought before his time

“As a child,”  wrote Woodhouse,  Desmond Morris “watched his father die slowly of wounds received in World War One,”  which ended a decade before Morris was born.

His father’s death came in 1942,  in the middle of World War II,  when Desmond Morris was 14.

This,  said Woodhouse,  “filled the young Desmond with hatred for what humans did to each other.  He cut himself off from mankind at the family lake,  carefully observing the animals,  fish and waterfowl.”

His mother excluded him from his father’s funeral.

Said Desmond Morris himself in a 2013 Guardian interview,  “Grieving probably came later, when I started to think about those bastards in Whitehall who had sent him off to die.  It was the beginning of a lifelong hatred of the establishment.  The church,  the government and the military were all on my hate list and have remained there ever since.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

From artist to scientist

Wikipedia suggests that Desmond Morris’s great grandfather William Morris,  “an enthusiastic Victorian naturalist and founder of the Swindon local newspaper,  greatly influenced him.”

However,  William Morris died at age 65 in 1891,  37 years before Desmond Morris was born.

Serving in the British Army for two years in 1946-1948,  and,  while in the army,  becoming a lecturer in fine arts at the Chiseldon Army College in Wiltshire,  England,  Desmond Morris tried his hand as a surrealist painter and film maker,  with modest success,  exhibiting paintings alongside the renowned surrealist Joan Miro,  before turning to science.

“At Birmingham University,”  Woodhouse recounted,  Desmond Morris “studied zoology but refused to do animal experiments,”  instead becoming an ethologist,  meaning a student of animal behavior in natural habitat.

“His doctoral thesis,”  completed in 1954  “involved years of watching the aggressive mating dance of the 10-spined stickleback,”  Woodhouse wrote.

(Beth Clifton collage)

From ape art to television

Remaining at Oxford,  Desmond Morris next studied the reproductive behavior of birds.

“In 1956,”  recounts Wikipedia,   “he moved to London as head of the Granada Television and Film Unit for the Zoological Society of London,  and studied the picture-making abilities of apes.”

This included staging two exhibitions of chimpanzee art,  the first in 1957.  The second,  in 1958, compared the work of chimps to that of human infants.

The television work led to a multi-year stint hosting 500 episodes of the weekly Zoo Time program for Grenada Television,  interrupted by hosting 100 episodes of the BBC show Life in the Animal World before returning to Zoo Time.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Tried to teach sex to pandas

Desmond Morris left television in 1959 to become the London Zoo curator of mammals.  In that capacity he tried unsuccessfully to induce the London Zoo’s female giant panda Chi Chi to mate with An An,  a male panda borrowed from the Moscow Zoo.

Frustrated and ridiculed,  and increasingly skeptical of the whole concept of zoos and animal exhibition generally,  Desmond Morris left the London Zoo in 1967 to become executive director of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts.

That stint was at an end when Desmond Morris,  then age 39,  met Tom Maschler,  chief executive at the publishing company Jonathan Cape.

The Naked Ape

Desmond Morris offered to write a book explaining why humans are the only hairless ape,  why men proudly claim the largest brain of any ape but hide a relatively huge penis,  and why women have breasts allegedly biologically designed as much for attracting partners as for producing milk.

When Maschler said he would read the book manuscript if Desmond Morris wrote it,  Desmond Morris produced The Naked Ape in just four weeks.

The Naked Ape,  continuously in print for nearly 60 years now,  has sold more than 20 million copies.

“Some disliked his dismissal of religion as a biological tendency to submit to an alpha male,”  recalled Woodhouse.  “Feminists were furious with his portrayal of men as ‘risk-taking’ hunter-gatherers who drove human evolution, while women sat at home in the cave.

“It was mankind seen through the eyes of a zoologist––not an anthropologist.  It framed our behavior in the context of evolution ––not culture.

“As a thesis, it was hotly contested,  but it was wildly popular and had lasting influence.

“It was a bible of human actions for the Age of Aquarius,  and plumbed for insight into the practice of modern sex.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“I like animals”

From 1967 on,  Desmond Morris was primarily an author,  though he also continued to paint.  In all,  Desmond Morris either wrote,  edited,  or contributed substantial portions to at least 100 books,  as sole author of about 70 of them.

Among his most successful titles after The Naked Ape were Catwatching,  Dogwatching, Babywatching,  and The Human Zoo.

Many of Desmond Morris’ books sold reasonably well,  but none of the rest had the profound influence of The Naked Ape.

In particular,  The Naked Ape stimulated recognition of humans as an animal species,  of our capacity shared with animals to experience pleasure and pain,  and of our especially close relationship with non-human primates who,  at the time,  were extensively and relatively unquestioningly used in biomedical research.

Said Desmond Morris,  “I like animals and I feel proud to call myself one. I’ve never looked down upon them,  so to call human beings animals is not,  to me,  degrading.”

Hans Ruesch.
(Beth Clifton collage)

Changed focus of antivivisectionism

Before The Naked Ape,  the primary antivivisection argument had been the pre-Charles Darwin creationist contention that humans,  having been supposedly created by God,  are so unlike animals that nothing learned from animal experimentation can be accurately extrapolated to human medicine.

This argument,  popularized parallel to Morris’ success as an author by former racing car driver Hans Reusch,  is still often voiced by animal advocates.

       (See Fauci vs. the White Coat Waste Project: did Hans Ruesch sire the conflict?)

Post- The Naked Ape,  however,  the opposite argument,  that animal experimentation is cruel and immoral because animals are so much like us,  began to gain traction.  Voiced almost 100 years earlier by Charles Darwin himself,  among others,  this argument became the central thesis of Animal Liberation,  the 1975 book by Peter Singer that is widely credited with launching the modern animal rights movement.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Increasingly uneasy”

Focused on writing books,  however,  more about humans than about animals,  Desmond Morris was primarily an observer of the rise of the animal rights movement,  rather than an active participant.

His first major statement about animal rights may have come in 1990,  in a foreword he wrote for Rose Tinted Menagerie,  by William Johnson.

“As a professional zoologist I have become increasingly uneasy about the way our species has been treating the other animals with which we share this small planet,”  Desmond Morris began.

“Despite our greater understanding of the behavior and needs of animals,  there are many areas in which there has been remarkably little reduction in their exploitation and persecution.

“One such area is that of the performing animal.  The idea that it is funny to see wild animals coerced into acting like clumsy humans,  or thrilling to see powerful beasts reduced to cringing cowards by a whipcracking trainer,  is primitive and medieval.  It stems from the old idea that we are superior to other species and have the right to hold dominion over them.”

(Beth Clifton photo)

“Must rid ourselves of arrogance”

Desmond Morris went on to recommend that,  “We must rid ourselves of that earlier arrogance and recognize that we,  too,  are part of nature and must respect it in all its forms.  If we fail to do this,  our own future on this planet is seriously at risk.  A start must be made by trying to change the way people think about animals,  and persuading them to look at each species from its own point of view.

“One of the first steps will be to turn our backs on the travesty of nature that is the performing animal.  Let the human circus survive and flourish with its thrills, spills and excitements, and its colorful traditions,”  Desmond Morris wrote.

“But let the animal circus join bear-baiting,  bull-baiting and cockfighting in the dustbin of antique abuses that no longer entertain us.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Dogfighting,  cockfighting,  & cats

This was of course before the rise of pit bull advocacy,  the concomitant rise of dogfighting to greater prominence than at any time since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I,  and a parallel explosion of cockfighting,  especially in the U.S.

Desmond Morris in his books Catwatching and Catlore (1993) hypothesized that cats are such efficient killers that most of the time they have no need to hunt,  and that they therefore have evolved spare time,  most of which they spend sleeping.

He also cited studies suggesting that,  even then,  up to 91% of owned cats had been sterilized,  an estimate subsequently supported by studies showing that about 40% of newly acquired cats were (and are) born as part of the unowned,  free-roaming cat population,  not in homes.

(Beth Clifton photo/collage)

Urged sanctuary for former lab chimps

Taking a rare leading role in an animal rights controversy,  Desmond Morris in 2001 joined primatologist Jane Goodall,  wildlife filmmaker David Attenborough,  the Coalition to End Experiments on Chimpanzees in Europe,  the Great Ape Project,  and the World Society for the Protection of Animals in urging that 112 chimpanzees left by the closure of the former Dutch Biomedical Primate Research Center in Rijswijk be retired to sanctuaries by the Dutch Education Ministry.

This was eventually accomplished.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Denounced veggies

But Desmond Morris irrevocably split with the mainstream of the animal rights movement with a June 14,  2006 denunciation of vegetarianism and veganism.

“Our remote monkey ancestors thrived on a diet of seeds,  roots,  fruits,  berries,  nuts,
eggs and insects,”  Morris began.  “When our earliest forebears came down from the trees and began to walk on their hind legs, their front legs were freed from locomotion and their hands became specialized as weapon-carriers.  In this new state they began to scavenge for meat and soon to hunt for themselves.

“The better they became as hunters,  the greater was the proportion of meat in their diet,”  Morris asserted.  “This protein boost had a major impact on their success and the human species, as a cooperative hunter/ gatherer,  was soon spreading out across the planet and heading eventually for global domination.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Victorians

That much was already a prevailing theory among evolutionists as far back as Desmond Morris’s great-grandfather William Morris’ time,  in the Victorian high point of the British Empire,  when British imperialists popularly supposed that it was their meat-eating vigor,  more than their guns,  that enabled them to conquer and dominate the largely vegetarian Hindus and Buddhists of India and southern China.

This of course overlooked the superior intellectual accomplishments of the conquered Asian civilizations,  whose knowledge of the arts and sciences Britain was in the Victorian age only just beginning to equal.

Desmond Morris added to the Victorian case for meat-eating the argument that,  “Our physiology came to favor the special amino-acid balance found only in meat.  Proteins obtained from plants are usually deficient in at least some of the eight amino-acids obtained from carnivorous food. So it became possible for us to thrive on an omnivorous diet––one that included both meat and vegetable food.

“This appears to have been a genetic change and not merely a cultural one,”  Desmond Morris insisted.  “This information upsets some vegans who claim that their meat-free diet is superior to a mixed,  omnivorous one.  The biological truth is that a vegetarian diet is greatly inferior.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Threw veggies a bone

Desmond Morris then threw vegetarians and vegans a bone:

“It is worth pointing out,”  he wrote,  “that if vegetarians and vegans are avoiding meat because of their concerns over animal welfare,  this means that their sacrifice is even greater than they admit.  Not only do they give up the pleasures of eating meat,”  which assumes that there might be such “pleasures” for those of us to whom “meat stinks” is a literal reality,  “but they are also prepared to stick to their principles despite the fact that they are forcing themselves to accept a diet that is imperfect for the digestive system of a human being.  This does not weaken their moral position: it makes it even stronger.”

There were by then hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies associating diseases of the human gastro-intestinal tract primarily to consumption of meat and other animal products.

            (See,  for example,  New study hits red meat, processed meat, & poultry for higher death risk and Oscar Meyer leaving town after findings linking hot dogs to cancer.)

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Cheap cereal foods”

Wading further into deep bovine excrement,  Desmond Morris continued,  “Among poorer countries another problem arises – the consumption of a diet that favors cheap cereal foods over expensive meat foods.

“With the balance between protein and carbohydrate upset, the Third World manages to struggle on and breed successfully in large numbers,  but without the nutritional balance appropriate for the human species.”

What Desmond Morris failed to either acknowledge or explain was,  and is,  why nations whose diets favor “cheap cereal foods over expensive meat foods,”  including India and China,  lead the world in producing engineers,  scientists,  and medical doctors,  to such an extent that the most heavily meat-consuming nations––including the U.S. and England––could barely function without them.

Beth & Merritt Clifton.

Neither did Desmond Morris acknowledge or explain why people from cultures favoring “cheap cereal foods over expensive meat foods” have come to dominate intellectually and physically demanding pastimes ranging from chess-playing to marathon running.

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