Aw. Poor little guy!

Last edited by Sammy Ambrose (2013-07-11 22:54:06)

Having commented on the cruelty involved, I can't say that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the PG Ads, Chimp's tea parties & trips to the Circus back in the day.

We tolerated far more back then.

... We had various pets at home in the country and one day the dog peed on the floor so my mother went across to kick it, slipped in the wee, fell on her arse and injured her ankle. Everybody laughed their heads off. When the dog much later died my mother shook her head and said "Shame, I still owed him a kick."

Life was better then.

Don't any of you remember Daktari - n - by 'little guy' I meant it figuratively not in the sense of that perv Woody Allen.

The Nim Chimpsky story is worth watching if you can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGOeOMsx-4

Regarding some of the points raised herein: Chimps are much stronger than humans on the average, at least twice as strong, but claims that they are five or eight times as strong as a man are unlikely and really unverifiable.

There have been a couple of other horrendous chimp attacks in recent years. Locally, a man and his wife were visiting their pet chimp at a sanctuary where they had been forced to place him after he bit off a woman's fingertip. Two other chimps got loose and attacked the couple. The man had his ears and testicles ripped off, his face mutilated and suffered other injuries. The chimps were shot and killed with a .45 revolver. The pet chimp they were visiting subsequently escaped and vanished into the local mountains. More recently, at a sanctuary in South Africa, two male chimps grabbed a graduate student from Texas and dragged him under the fence and injured him badly although I am not sure of the extent of his injuries.

Apes seem to have much higher pain thresholds than humans. I was once talking with zookeeper working with Siamangs at the L.A. Zoo and asked him about this. He said, "I'll say, you have to practically beat them over the head with an iron rod to get their attention!" And these are comparatively small apes. Thus, some of the training methods used on chimps and orangs that may seem horribly cruel may not really be so bad. Just a thought.

Thinking further about all this it absolutely makes good evolutionary sense - You couldn't possibly live the life of a monkey and be all sensitive and delicate could you ?

LOL !