The Grumpy Owl

pic nicked from here

Chimps seem to have a similar reaction to the death of a group member as humans.  No, they don’t all put on black ties and get drunk around the corpse.  Rather, they comfort the dying and then appear to experience trauma.  Some chimp mothers even refuse to let go of their dead baby for really long periods of time. They just keep carrying it around.  No matter how disgusting that baby gets.

It’s always dangerous to assign human characteristics to other animals but I don’t think this one is too much of a stretch.  Most mammals can tell when something is no longer there.  Even my cat howls at the door when its human-shaped, food supply has been gone for longer than usual.  And that cat is no chimp.

Tags: chimpanzees, death, mourning

Many people find it cruel to allow a chimp to smoke and drink.  If someone was shipping Johnny Walker and Marlboros into the wild and selling them to the chimps, I’d agree.  But when a captive ape takes up smoking and drinking, I cheer it on. Sending said ape to rehab is cruel.

A caged life is a miserable life.  If a chimp has found some way to numb itself, some way to pass the pointless hours of another pointless day, I’m not going to sit in judgement.  It’s wrong to imprison an intelligent creature like Zhora and doubly wrong to get all sanctimonious about his habits.  It’s not like he committed a crime other than not being human.

And now that he becomes a little more human, we decide to send him to rehab.  To what purpose?  Just to steal away what little joy and purpose remains in his life?  For his health?  Zhora is twenty six years old.  Just how long do we want him for our prisoner?

Humans are chimpanzees.  You probably enjoy a drink and maybe a smoke.  If you were in Zhora’s shoes, you might really enjoy one.

Zhora, as a former performer, an artist and father of seven, has probably done better in his cage than you have in yours.  Let him have a drink and enjoy a smoke.

Zhora has earned it.  I doubt you have.

Tags: chimpanzee, rehab, smoking, zhora

chimpanzee fetus on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

While I’m busy messing around with all the new features on my blog, a new scientific discipline is being created:  Primate archaeology.

This will focus on the use of tools and its history not just in humans but in all primate species.

We now know that we’re not the only animals who use tools.  So it’s a bit unfair to assume that every time we discover a tool, it was a human that invented it.  Or a space alien.

“It’s not clear whether we hominins invented this kind of stone technology, or whether both humans and the great apes inherited it from a common forebear . . .  We used to think that culture and, above anything else, technology was the exclusive domain of humans, but this is not the case. We need comparable methods of data collection among researchers dealing with 2 million year old hominin sites and modern primatological assemblages.”

I’m  still waiting for Space Alien God Primate Archaeology but they probably already invented that.  In the seventies, I’m guessing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8p72wmR5H4&feature=related]

Tags: owls

Travis the chimp is getting a bad rap.  While he did maul a woman and attack the police before being shot to death, it’s a bit unfair to say he went berserk. If a human did that, sure, he went berserk.  But a chimp?

You might as well get angry at a German for eating shit.

Chimps are people but they’re jungle people.  They don’t belong in our world any more than we belong in theirs.  It’d be nice to live in a city where chimp and human could peacefully co-exist but, so far, no one has built it.    As things stand, you cannot just live with a chimp and expect it to turn out well.  Ask my mother.

Whatever one may think about the sort of people who name a chimp –or a human– Travis, one thing is abundantly clear:  They should not have had a pet chimp.  No one should.  A chimp is not a pet.

Was the store out of Eskimos?

It’s terrible that Travis was shot in the street.  And I doubt he cared much about his career in television.  We certainly don’t congratulate terrorists for putting their hostages on television. And just look at that picture:  Travis is in a squalid cage.

He should have been where he belonged, getting groomed by some comely young chimpette and eating the very best bananas.  Instead, for fifteen years, he was locked up and made a fool of. He finally attacks someone. It’s bad enough we shot him but do we have to say that he’s gone mad too?

How many chimps do humans kill every year for worse reasons than that?  I don’t see much of an outcry about our sanity. Human kills chimp is hardly news.

Travis escaped his cage, attacked his captors and was murdered for it.  Not only was he sane, he was also brave.

RIP Travis.  I hope the chimps that come next have a better go of it.

Researchers have discovered that being nice is the key to chimps becoming powerful alphas. Between a bully who does not return grooming and a smaller ape who is an obsessive groomer, the smaller ape wins control of the group and his pick of the female population.

This shows what I’ve often suspected.  All of that “Why don’t women like nice guys?” is just a bunch of self-involved nonsense.  The men who refer to themselves as “nice guys” are anything but.

By “nice” they mean boring, manipulative and incompetent.  By “not nice” they usually mean the guy who got the girl they wanted.   He must be mean.  He proved it by being successful with women.

And just who appointed these fellows judge and jury over who is right for some woman they want to hump?  What qualifies them to judge her tastes?

Instead of worrying about who likes them and why, these gentlemen should worry about who they like and why.  A simple and honest examination of their motives will often disprove any delusions of “nice.”

Far as I can tell, being honest, with warts and all, is better than pretending to be nice.  Anything else is just a waste of time.  Wasting people’s time is cruel.  Just like men, women have far too little of that currency to spend it on bullshit.

pc nicked from here

Researchers have discovered that chimps can identify members of their group by their bums. In the test they were able to correctly match an ass with the correct face.  And not once did they get all angry and say: “My ass, your face.”  Nor did they express a desire to “tap that ass.”

One can reasonably suspect they thought it.

This remarkable ability did not extend to strangers, indicating that there is no correlation between faces and asses but, rather, the chimps simply knew –without the help of pants– what their friends’ asses looked like.

Good for them.

Now that the economy is going into the shitter, it’s time to ask that age old question: What would a chimp do? (W.W.C.D.)

Chimps like to trade services. Their whole economy is based –literally– on “you scratch my back and I scratch yours.”  Even primitive jerks like macaques (some chimps have –I’m serious– been known to call them “shit monkeys”) will trade grooming for sex.

But chimps have a strong aversion to trading goods. Even trained chimps dislike the idea of trading some piece of crap, like a carrot, for something really good, like a grape. They seem to think a carrot in the hand is better than a grape in the bush. Untrained chimps will have nothing to do with any of it.

They just eat the carrot.

It’s a bit of a mystery why chimps feel this way. The general consensus is that they have no rules to govern trade. This makes them wary.

This logic is completely backwards. Chimps refuse to trade because trade is unregulated? Balderdash! How are you supposed to regulate an economy that doesn’t yet exist? Makes no sense. We have a hard time regulating an economy that does exist. Some people don’t even want to do that.

The rules about trade must have emerged after trade did. They probably came into existence after one of our ancestors — a big strong one– got ripped off. The moron probably traded a grape for a carrot. Then, I’m guessing, that other one probably learned some rules. Something about a carrot and a stick.

No one likes a tourist and chimps are no different. Eco-tourists and scientists who gawk at these great apes have been giving them colds. Colds kill chimps.

The only question is whether the tourism saves more chimps than it kills. Half the members of habitated groups of apes are dying because of human-passed respiratory illness. Would poachers kill more? They probably would. But at least we’d get chimp-hand doorstops and things of that nature. And there would never be any nonsense about our good intentions.

There’s something wrong, not just with eco-tourism, but with tourism in general. Though I’ve never been able to put my finger on it, I dislike the idea of turning the world into a theme park. There is something very strange and disconcerting about people from the first world galavanting around the third world to marvel at the poverty.

Yet, as tempting as the idea sometimes is, we can’t just lock everyone up in their own countries. If we did that, instead of traveling to foreign climes with cameras, we’d probably take guns. You can’t stop people from moving around. We love to travel.

These chimps are in the same position as a lot of humans. You either let the rich people invade with Starbucks or you have them invade with tanks. Either way, sooner or later, the fuckers are showing up. The question then becomes how do you keep them from killing you with their love. It’s not so easy.

An abundance of tourist money drives local prices up and there’s no corresponding increase in wages. It’s a a weird and pernicious welfare injection. The tourists, of course, don’t stick around long enough to notice and, long after they’ve returned home, the problems they left behind remain.

The best idea is to have these people somehow invested in the areas they travel to. But, if they did that, it wouldn’t be a vacation. It’d be work.

They’ll probably start giving the wild chimps antibiotics to protect them against the thing thing that was supposed to protect them against something else. Nature will just be one big zoo and the world will just be divided between our themeparks and our warzones.

There must be a better way than this but I don’t know what it is.

Tourist sculpture by Duane Hanson

It’s been well known for a while that chimpanzees have culture. What has been recently discovered is how they transmit it. Turns out they’re a lot like people. Chimps use role models and, even more interestingly, these role models must be fellow apes.

Humans can imitate anything. We can use chimps as role models, if we please. But, according to this study, chimps have wisely decided not to emulate us and only copy other chimps. I wish that were true but I doubt it. I’ve certainly read accounts of chimps who were raised by humans imitating humans.

Unfortunately, other than the species requirement, there is no mention of what qualifies a chimp as a role model. One would assume that it has something to do with their position in the hierarchy but you can never be sure.

A few weeks ago chimps beat humans on a memory test. This was big news because we’re an incredibly arrogant species. Anyone who has read anything about chimps would not be terribly surprised.

They’re better at us at certain mental tasks. A lot of animals are better than us at a lot of things.

Let’s just hope that they never develop opposable thumbs. That’s what our advantage boils down to and we better not lose it. I suspect that we’ve pissed the chimps off.

This incident was portrayed as being sort of a surprising fluke. Judge for yourself. Watch the video and test yourself against the chimp.

You will lose.

The chimps did not just beat us. They destroyed us. It was not even close. These things are smart. It’s time to stop experimenting on them. But we should let them smoke if they want. And wear hats. They seem to really like hats.

Being a fan of Papa Joe, I have to admit that I’m not very surprised that he wanted to create an army of super-apes. Who doesn’t? I would love an army of apes and so would you. Don’t lie. You know you would.

What does surprise me, however, is just how stupid people in the 1920s must have been. Think about it. Stalin paid the best minds a fortune to develop this ape army. The best -the only- thing they could come up with was “impregnating chimpanzees.” If I lay down $200,000 I’d like to see some better ideas than chimp humping. I could have come up with that myself. Shit, I come up with that every time I go to the zoo. If making sweet love to an irresistible chimp resulted in super-ape babies, this new master race would have taken over the world by the 1700s.

Then, when impregnating chimpanzees didn’t work, they tried impregnating human females. These scientists were quite obviously working out their kinks at the expense of the government. With top minds like these, is there still any doubt about why Stalin had the purges?

And it’s not like there weren’t other ideas floating around. H.G. Wells published “The Island of Doctor Moreau” in 1896. You might have thought that these Soviet scientists would have tried some grafts and amputation. You know, cut off a woman’s arm and glue a chimp’s arm to her. Or maybe they didn’t have glue back then. No mind. Nails would have worked just as well.