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Lab chimps finally let outside embrace.

On Tuesday, 38 lab chimps were allowed outside for the first time in thirty years.  Taken from Africa, their mothers slaughtered, they had been locked in cages and were victims of a terrible series of experiments in an attempt to find a cure for HIV. This program achieved absolutely nothing.

Hooked up to machines and pumped full of chemicals, they were truly prisoners of utter despair. With no stimulation, no nurturing love and no hope, many were driven to the brink of madness and sometimes beyond.

But their ordeal finally ended on Tuesday when the 38 surviving chimps were released into a £3million sanctuary in Austria, allowing them to feel the nurturing contact of their fellow chimps after years of being separated by bars and bullet-proof glass.

Michael Aufhauser,a 59 year old conservationist, was instrumental in securing their release. He says:

‘They are all traumatized to greater or lesser degrees. Two of them died before the reserve was finished, but at least those that are left will have a quality of life that was unthinkable when they were prisoners of the lab.”

You can see footage of their reaction to being outside for the first time below. A kleenex may be in order.

As of October 2006, there were still 1,133 chimpanzees being used in labs in America. ((The only two countries that still allow such experiments are the USA and Gabon.) The chimpanzee’s similarities to humans, which make them appealing test subjects is exactly why they should never be test subjects.

Not only is it unethical, it is of dubious scientific value. At best, the practice is obsolete.

Generally, I believe scientists should be given a free hand. But there is a line. And experimenting on chimps crosses it.

Continue reading »]]> Charlie the smoking chimpanzee died of a heart attack on Wednesday and it wasn’t smoking that killed him.  The average chimp lives to 40 and Charlie lived to 52.

A rare pleasure for the poor beast.

Charlie was one of the first things I posted about on this blog, way back in 2005, and I stand by what I said then: Smoking isn’t good for you but neither is being locked up in a cage.  Any members of the species who locked Charlie up can shut the hell up about how the chimp chooses to spend his time.  Kidnappers have no moral high ground.  On scale of things, smoking is nothing compared to locking up an intelligent animal to be gawked at by morons.  I would’ve given him booze if he wanted that.

I hope Charlie enjoyed every one of his cigarettes while he was alive because you can’t smoke when you’re dead.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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