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Do Animals Laugh?

Critter News

Researchers tickled babies and six different kinds of apes, quantified their giggles, and found that the patterns fit a classic evolutionary tree. Those patterns hint at the ancient origins of human hilarity and suggest that other social species - including apes, dogs and rats - really, truly laugh as well.

Apes 100
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From Today's New York Times

Animal Ethics

To the Editor: Re “An Ape Types in Iowa” (column, Aug. 9): Gail Collins writes: “Human-ape conversation was a very hot topic back in the late 1960s, when researchers first taught a chimpanzee named Washoe to use sign language. The Great Ape Trust is the only place in America where this kind of research still goes on.”