Visions of Culibun is a treatise on the relationship between chimpanzees and humans, illustrated with a series of anecdotes, each chapter focusing on a different aspect of the relationship. The argument running throughout the book is that chimpanzees are unique, intelligent, richly emotional, and self-aware beings, very much like ourselves. Descriptions of wild and captive chimpanzees are used to support this assertion, and the treatment (or mistreatment) of chimpanzees by humans is presented from this single point of view.
Throughout the book, Shakespeare's character of Caliban from The Tempest serves as a metaphor for chimpanzees. Caliban possesses the "honored shape" of humans but is described as "a monster or a man-monster.'' He can speak, he can dream, and he can feel, but he is depicted as something akin to, but less than human. The early chapters discuss the discontinuous view of humans as separate from, and superior to other animals and the consequences for chimpanzees of this view as opposed to seeing chimpanzees and humans as close points on the continuum of nature.
Peterson and Goodall depict chimpanzees as "blessed or cursed by the honored shape" (Ch. 5 : What Ho! Slave). The curse is slavery according to the authors. Slavery is used here not as a metaphor but as a description of one aspect of the relationship between humans and chimpanzees. The argument goes something like: if humans and chimpanzees are close together on the continuum of nature and chimpanzees, like humans, are self-aware, then we must re-examine our ethical relationship with chimpanzees and our treatment of them in light of this view. Although not going quite to the position that chimpanzees should be afforded the same rights as humans, the implication that they should is clear.
Chapter 6 is an insider's view of the chimpanzee trade, as it was in the 1960s and as it may be still on a smaller scale. The description is an unashamedly one-sided view of the trade, but it provides a great deal of detail about the issue, the people, and the corporations involved, as well as the effects of the trade on chimpanzee populations in West Africa. Population figures by country are given in an appendix. These figures have not been easily available before, being scattered among a number of publications and only compiled in a report to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife service.
The lives of chimpanzees and orangutans in the entertainment industry and a series of portraits of chimpanzee owners and their pets make up the rest of the middle