It’s not clear from the article in the Smithsonian:
Recently, Michael Egnor commented on radical primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s effort to level the playing field between humans and bonobos by including the latter as authors of a research paper on animal welfare: “Non-human animals don’t have abstract knowledge-making and practices that would allow them to be meaningfully consulted. It is reality, not anthropocentric bias, that has left animals out of this decision-making process.”
There is a larger and very interesting story around that paper, recently relayed at Smithsonian Magazine by Lindsay Stern, a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Yale and author of a novel, The Study of Animal Languages.
Her article tells us a good deal about the motivations of those who, essentially, see bonobos not as apes in need of protection but, to judge from their rhetoric, as something like an oppressed people.
Denyse O’Leary, “But, in the end, did the chimpanzee really talk?” at Mind Matters News
Also:
Can animal minds rival humans under the right circumstances? Are we just not being fair to animals, as some researchers think? Including apes as co-authors on a primatology research paper created quite a stir—among humans. The apes didn’t care.
Researchers: Apes are just like us! And we’re not doing the right things to make them start behaving that way…
and
Dolphinese: The idea that animals think as we do dies hard. But first it can lead us down strange paths.