Posted on 04/15/2005 3:36:01 PM PDT by Rakkasan1
World Briefings
Published: April 15, 2005
SOUTH AFRICA: GET THIS MONKEY OFF HIS BACK A male chimpanzee at Bloemfontein Zoo is wrestling to break a nicotine addiction after picking up the smoking habit from visitors who tossed lit cigarette butts into his enclosure, zoo officials said. The adult chimp, named Charlie, probably acquired the butts by mimicking zoogoers' smoking as they passed by, leading them to toss him cigarettes. Charlie now hides his cigarettes when zookeepers approach so that they will not be confiscated, officials said. Nor is it his only bad habit. Charlie has three bad teeth, said a zoo official, Daryl Barnes, blame for which goes to visitors who continue to feed him sugary soft drinks. Michael Wines (NYT)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
They might all smoke, or burst into flames for all I care.
I don't have any sympathy for chimps since that poor man with the birthday cake got attacked a few weeks back. Has anybody heard an update on him?
that would be a monkey who's been watching the Left Wing on TV
Charlie has three bad teeth, said a zoo official, Daryl Barnes, blame for which goes to visitors who continue to feed him sugary soft drinks. Michael Wines (NYT)
Probably doesn't floss enough.
monkey meth mouth
rather sad.
No, but I guess you don't have any sympathy for people then either. We are always killing, raping, pillaging and so forth....well some of us are anyway.
Funny thing about that. My dentist has this "educational" computer presentation, with embedded video, running in the treatment rooms. One segment has a chimp that flosses and brushes. She doesn't brush too well, but her flossing skills are excellent.
Do you really see no difference there?
Well not so very much. Chimps aren't as intelligent as people, but they do display a large variance in behaviors, one to another, as do humans. There are some places I either won't go at all, or will only go armed, but that doesn't mean I don't have sympathy for the folks who live there, nor does it mean I have no sympathy for all people.
As with all animals, you have to treat with them based on some kind of understanding of their behaviors. You can't apply human standards, especially not those appropriate in American society, to chimps. We are supposed to be the intelligent ones after all.
In the case at hand it was human error that allowed the aggressive young chimps (Males, IIRC) who tend to be very territorial, to have access to the humans who were coming to visit the chimp they had raised. That chimp I have a lot of sympathy for, because he or she was not raised as a chimp, but rather as a human. If they gave it up before it got too very old, that might not be so bad, because the differences between baby humans, baby gorillas, and baby chimps are less than the comparable difference between adults of those three species. The folks who had raised the chimp didn't expect any other chimps to be around, so they weren't in the proper frame of mind for handling those aggressive/territorial males, assuming they would ever have had it, which is questionable considering they undertook to raise a chimp beyond just the early "rescue" phase, say through weaning or eruption of teeth.
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