During school visits I’m often asked what the average person can do to help the great apes. If the answer is hard, it’s only because the possibilities are so plentiful.

What chimps need most are impassioned people willing to devote their time to their care. That means many different types: field biologists, nongovernmental organization managers, and veterinarians, but also lawyers, lobbyists, and lawmakers. Some of the young people who care so much about apes now will one day come to fill these roles.

Most of us, though, won’t devote our lives to conservation. There are many ways to help, even so. Conservation is expensive, so one way to contribute is to pitch in to adopt a chimp at an African sanctuary. Through the Jane Goodall Institute (www.janegoodall.org), you and a group of friends can support a chimp and keep her supplied with care and bananas and everything else she needs to survive, while simultaneously contributing to the local economy. Also through the institute you will find resources on forming a Roots & Shoots society, clubs focused on identifying conservation issues of domestic concern and taking action to help them.

Another charity I’ve come to greatly respect is the Animal Legal Defense Fund (www.aldf.org), which undertakes the representation of animals in court. Its goals are varied: securing the release of chimps from medical testing facilities, ceasing cruel maternal deprivation studies in research centers, ensuring animal abusers are prosecuted, and making sure livestock is treated as humanely as possible. Within a highly ordered society like ours, legal action is often the most effective way to protect vulnerable and mistreated animals. Pursuing justice isn’t as romantic as bottle-feeding baby chimps, but it’s even more vital. ALDF also maintains a great list of ways you can help animals in your own community under the “Resources” heading of their web page.

Every once in a while (like at the time of this writing, February 2013), the National Institutes of Health puts out Requests for Information (RFIs) about guidelines for the use of animals in medical testing or research. These are solicitations for opinions from experts and the general public alike. If you have something to say about how we treat animals, keep a lookout for these RFIs on their website (www.nih.gov) and write a letter. Have your friends sign it with you, and copy your congressional representative. If you need extra ammunition on the cruelty of such research, or its far-reaching impact on the wild chimp populations of Africa — whose infants are hunted to become test subjects — I suggest turning to Peterson and Goodall’s Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People.

The cure for cruelty is expanding the moral imagination. The great civil rights struggles have always been about taking a group that has historically been seen as “other” and learning to see it as “self.” Whether it’s about stopping cruelty to animals or helping AIDS orphans a continent away, the best side of humanity lies in expanding our empathies as much as we can. Helping the chimpanzees is but one of those paths.