Santino is my hero. He was kept imprisoned in a cage, and his response was to throw rocks at his obnoxious captors. He’d scavenge the prison yard at night for whatever loose stones he could find, and he’d cache them for the morning. When there weren’t enough rocks, he’d pound the concrete retaining wall to knock loose chips of stone. Then when the jailers would show up, zip, zip, zip, a rain of stones on them. You have to respect that kind of defiance and planning.
Santino is a tough guy. Santino is also a chimpanzee.
Doesn’t that make you wonder a bit? Chimpanzees fight back at being caged, and they do so with forethought and resourcefulness. I imagine our ancestors felt the same way at every obstacle to their life, from marauding leopards to bad weather, and they stoked a bit of rage to fight back (which was probably ineffective in dealing with a thunderstorm, requiring slightly cleverer strategies). It’s a start; it’s a way of using your brain to resist, and I think it’s a very human approach to a problem.
Unfortunately, the story does not have a happy ending, and this also tells us something about modern humanity. Santino was not a placid clown for the crowds, so his keepers fixed him: Santino has been castrated.
I think they should have taught him how to use an AK-47 and turned him loose in his native habitat to instruct his brothers and sisters in better ways to defend themselves.
They castrated him! The damn dirty apes!!
Santino may also be a libertarian.
“Unfortunately, the story does not have a happy ending”
I know I felt a shudder up my body when I read that. Poor chimp.
Excellent point, humans have this obnoxious narcissism that we are smarter than everything else, and therefore have a right to do what we like, yet we think that nothing else has any right to defend itself.
There has been so much good research done on this area recently (another recent studyhere on morality) you would hope we would finally starting to treat the rest of the biosphere in a slightly better way. You’d think we’d be starting to learn our lessons, what with global warming and the like.
PZ — you just earned a huge amount of credit in my books with that last post.
These poor creatures are like us in almost all important respects. They don’t have a recursive grammar and don’t seem to grasp the successor function. (Neither do a quarter of my freshmen. Just kidding.) Seriously though, to all appearances, chimps have rich social and mental lives just like us. The fact that our kind takes for granted that one of our lives is more valuable than one of theirs — in spite of the fact that there are millions if not billions too many of us and now rather few of them — is unbelievable arrogance. It says more about our tribalism and idiocy than about any reasonable standard.
I once asked students of mine how they would treat extra-terrestrials who were as advanced and interesting as chimps or elephants. To a one, they said they would spare no cost to preserve such alien creatures. When later asked why they didn’t feel the same way about our Terran aliens, they were at a dead-loss. Several later told me that this little thought experiment really helped convince them that bonobos, chimps, orangutans, elephants and other self-aware species deserve serious protection. We have a moral duty toward them. (Myself, I’d like to see the UN give this idea some very serious teeth.)
I think someone should have stolen him away and put him in Florida to deal with the tourists…
Somehow I have a funny feeling that no instruction would be needed for this chimp, he seems to be a pretty decent autodidact with the brains to figure it out for himself.
Too bad his wimpy caretakers had cut of his balls, they couldn’t come up with a better idea like a high screen fence or partition?
He only threw stones at visitors, zookeepers are the captors.
Chimps are like humans, some of them act badly because they’ve had a hard life, or have been mistreated, but, like people, some of them are just jerks.
By nipping his nuts, they’ve effectively ended his potential for passing along those very genes that could have advanced chimp evolution. Faced with a smart chimp, they took him out of the breeding pool. Way to go, morons.
#6
Thought provoking question. I admit that I have been a bit indifferent to the lives of these animals. I’m gonna stew on it a bit.
Mr Simpson, stop doing that
High screen might work.
They used that for Rigo (Silverback gorilla) at the Melbourne zoo. He had a tendency in his youth to loose it at the public and throw whatever he had to hand.
Another candidate for arming and returning. :)
I’ll bet that even without his, Santino will continue to throw rocks…
Go Santino!
Ouch.
Now if only we could snip the dead-ends of the human population.
Ray Comfort hardly uses them anyway.
I agree with Marc at #9, chimp just sounds like a dick. A smart dick, for sure, but still a dick. Reading the story, it doesn’t sound like he was really pissed at being captured, so much as he just hated visitors, maybe because they where in his territory.
Some animals are just…jerks.
#10
Didn’t you see what happened in Planet of The Apes?
@ #4
“Now the tribunal
has placed you in my custody for final disposition. Do you realize what that means?”
“No.”
“Emasculation to begin with. Then experimental surgery on the speech centers – on the brain. Eventually a kind of living death.
However, I have it in my power to grant a reprieve. That is why I summoned you here tonight. Tell me who and what you really are and where you came from, and no veterinary shall touch you.”
“I told you that at that hearing of yours.”
“You lied!
Where is your tribe?”
“My tribe! They live on another planet
in another solar system.”
“Even in your lies, some truth slips through. That mythical community you’re supposed to come from – Fort Wayne.”
“What about it?”
“A fort!
Unconsciously you chose a name
that was belligerent. Where were you nurtured?”
“Then… you don’t believe that prosecutor’s
charge that I’m a monster created by Dr Zira?”
“Certainly not. You’re a mutant.”
“That’s what Zira and Cornelius claim.
You’re talking heresy, doctor.”
“Of course!”
“Suppose I am a mutant.
How can the appearance of one mutant send you into a panic?”
“Because you’re not unique. There’s the one you call Landon.”
“Oh. Then you admit that…”
“I admit that where there’s one mutant,
there’s probably another and another. A whole nest of them.
Where is your nest, Taylor? Where are your women?”
“Thank you. Thank you for calling me Taylor.
Dr Zaius, I know who I am.
But who are you?”
Aww, poor Santino
Go Stampy! I mean Santino. Wonder how long it will take before he takes to smearing his missiles with poo.
It’s just a stones throw.
And the zoo visitors will get the shit end of it.
Primate Solidarity!
…and why castrate him, why not give him something educational and entertaining to do? If the cephalopods get toys and puzzles to help occupy them instead of concentrating on escape, amusing destruction of aquarium property, or juggling other residents of the tank…
I know, give him a pet dog or kitty! Yeah, that’s the ticket. Just not an octopus, because they would be able to scheme joint land and sea operations.
And then pretty soon they’ll have bigger boards, with bigger nails.
I’ve been wavering in my support for zoos lately. On one hand, it does seem unfair to capture and display animals for our amusement. But on the other, zoos are awesome and they could prevent eco-tourism, which is ridiculously damaging. Maybe zoos need a better, more humane setup. But I’m not sure what that is.
Santino has been castrated.
They didn’t mention that on the Today Programme. How sad.
I can’t stop thinking about James Caan whenever I here about this story.
True but humans breed like rats, or more like cockroaches, since rats actually have some dignity. Humans consume like glutenous bottom feeders, spreading pig shit and cow farts throughout the environment to quench their bottomless lust for fat.
Humans are the Morlocks, not fanciful future victims of the Morlocks.
I smile and wave at my fellow morlocks, but most of them are so stupid they couldn’t pass an audition for Idiocracy.
Will Nature PLEEZE PLEEZE bring on a really vicious flu and wipe out 90 percent of the Morlocks?
If you want a decent planetery omlette, ya gottsa break some eggs.
It’s all Humpty Dumpty retard fuckwads from where I’m sittin, good riddance extraneous mutant suicidal apetard mouth breathing meatbags, your input has been noted get back to me when your eyeballs cease to explode.
Thank you
-Influenza-
Yeah, getting pissed off at a bunch of rubberneckers staring at you all day, every day while you’re trying to get on with your business is so unreasonable.
(I’m commenting on pharyngula for the first time- I am truly an atheist now!)
If you can feel bad enough about being caged that you fight back- you shouldn’t be caged. Simple to me, not so simple to the morons who think that we’re so freakin’ special that we have the right to do that to other species.
The world would be a better place if we’d all just agree we’re animals and move on.
There were a couple of statements at the end I found annoying: “They hope that his hormone levels will decrease and that will make him less prone to throw stones. He’s already getting fatter and he likes to play much more now than before. Being agitated isn’t good for him.”
Being agitated isn’t good for him, so the solution is surgery intended to damage his ability to become agitated? Jeez, I would have thought moving him would be the first choice.
I seem to remember that zoos won’t accept animals that have been altered in any way. But they’re willing to do it themselves?
If Santino was a gifted individual, it seems especially tragic to eliminate his genes in this way.
And when our ancestors couldn’t defend themselves again the elements they made up magic spells to control, we call them prayers.
“Santino has been castrated.”
How odd. We humans used to use that method of placation on unruly humans in the past. It never occurred to me that it would work on other species.
“taught him how to use an AK-47”
Glad to see your becoming more comfortable with the idea of arming your self. The AK might be a bit unwieldy for him, I think a nice compact Sten would be a better fit for a chimp.
But to the point of the story, at what level of consciousness is it ok to lock up an animal? I dislike the zoo. The bears, elephants, lions, and chimps look pathetic. They clearly aren’t happy. But are the snakes happy? Are the penguins sanguine? It is much easier to anthropomorphise higher mammals.
I agree with Man of Science. Seems to me that, given his thought processes and sheer cunning, his genetic material ought to have been passed on to a new generation of Chimps, raising their status in the evolution table. Who knows what progeny could have been had his reproductive ability not been nipped. Planet of the Apes might have become a reality in a few centuries.
I think the GOP has found a running mate for Joe the Plumber.
While it angers me to see any critter in cage, zoos and aquaria appear to be one of the few ways we can get the masses to give any kind of non-exploitative fuck about the other species on this planet. And even then, it tends to be only cute and fuzzy or huge vertebrates that really get the nod. If other species fall under an umbrella of benefit, it’s usually by proxy. I try to view the plight of the imprisoned as a “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” sort of thing.
A better picture of the calmer, easier-to-handle post-surgery Santino.
None of the stories I’ve read said anything about how he reacted to waking up and finding his testicles missing. You’d have to believe he’d notice.
“I imagine our ancestors felt the same way at every obstacle to their life, from marauding leopards to bad weather, and they stoked a bit of rage to fight back (which was probably ineffective in dealing with a thunderstorm, requiring slightly cleverer strategies). It’s a start; it’s a way of using your brain to resist, and I think it’s a very human approach to a problem.”
“And when our ancestors couldn’t defend themselves again the elements they made up magic spells to control, we call them prayers.”
Good to see hominids getting back to the roots of their faith.
http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly060111.htm
Has anyone read Visions of Caliban? Some pretty horrible stories on the treatment of chimps in captivity.
On the homepage of the zoo, they talk about the similarities of humans and chimps and ask “Doesn’t Santino walk a little like your uncle…” Ouch.
…and why castrate him, why not give him something educational and entertaining to do?
We can’t assume that they didn’t try, they have primate researchers at the site so they could have asked them.
I offer you the Daily Mash’s take on events: “Chimpanzee displays human trait of not liking prison”.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/animals/animals-headlines/chimpanzee-displays-human-trait-of-not-liking-prison-200903101631/
How odd. We humans used to use that method of placation on unruly humans in the past. It never occurred to me that it would work on other species.
We’ve been doing it with animal husbandry for that reason for years: steers, capons, and geldings are far more common and easy to work with in the farmyard than bulls, roosters and stallions.
One flew over the chimpanzee’s nest…
Surprised they didn’t lobotomize him. For his own good obviously…
Erase another tic off of the humans are special and not animals chart. Although I don’t really get it. Animals with forethought is new? Isn’t this why squirrels and ferrets and foxes hoard food for more scarce times? I am still amazed that people find discoveries of ‘animals do x’ are amazed that animals have emotions and cognitive abilities.
I think the point is chimps don’t usually make and hoard stones to throw at people. Santino had to think about his problem (run out of stones to throw, keepers will stop me from gathering stones) and come up with a solution (get stones in middle of night, hide stones near fence, break concrete to get more stones). He independantly figured out a plan requiring prior preparation.
A fascinating book is Next of Kin by Roger Fouts. He was involved in bringing up the first “talking chimp” – Wahoe, who learned American Sign Language. Among the amazing things you will learn there:
-Baby chimps are very like human children, the problem with bringing them up in the home is that by the age of 6, even a female is strong enough to kill a man.
-Female chimps have been observed teaching sign language to their children
-Chimps raised in human homes self-identify as humans. They will sort pictures of other chimps and humans into two piles. Pictures of themselves go with the humans.
-They like to drink. A mature chimp is more than capable of going to the fridge, fetching a gin and tonic, then settling down with a self-satisfied air back on the sofa.
-They even “get” pornography. A male chimp was seen to pause briefly in its perusal of magazine pictures of naked ladies and to gaze fixedly at the cylinder vacuum cleaner. It put down the magazine, went over to the vacuum, switched it on, placed the tube over its penis, climaxed, switched the machine off, and went back to its magazine.
More?
A comment on the news this morning from a biologist commenting on this story: hoarding behaviour in e.g. squirrels seems to be instinctive, i.e. it’s an evolved behaviour which all individuals of the species do, like spiders building webs. What the chimp’s been doing, however, is caching ammunition, in advance (that is, when he knows that there will be targets in a few days’ time), and the report also comments on the contrast between the calm and thoughtfulness of the preparation and the anger and agitation of the actual throwing.
This implies that the chimp has a mental model of the world and of its future state on a relatively long timescale, and of his own future emotional state and planned actions. So it’s not just emotion and cognitive abilities, it’s a level of internal world-modeling which really deserves to be called consciousness or sentience.
1. They should teach him how to use an AK-47 and turn him loose on creotards, CEOs, terrorists, and the like, darnit.
2. If it had been a girl, what would they do? Kill her? Fucking heartless bastards. (Before anyone writes me off as a radical green kook. I think experiments on animals are OK unless suffering takes place; but still, in any situation where it is possible, it’s better to use human volunteers or jail inmates. Prisoners could choose between, say, 25 years of incarceration and some medical/scientific experiment. Hey, there is a social contract for a reason, right? And to test medicine later to be used in humans, it’s best to use human test subjects. But, this thing aside, torture is NEVER okay.)
He’s displayed a wonderful grasp of basic planning. I’m not really surprised about it, we seem to be finding such creativity and mental prowess in all sorts of species. It’s sad really; in a world without humans, who knows what Santino’s kind could achieve. They’re too few now to do much more than dwindle to a population in captivity.
PZ:
There seems to be a validation error in this post that’s breaking the RSS feed
http://www.feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml
I find that it’s usually an invalid character where a single or double quote is being used. But right now some RSS readers can’t get your feed any more until that mistake if fixed or until the story rolls off the page (or more accurately, moves beyond the “get X most recent stories” limit of the reader).
This reminds me of a funny story. Two of my friends were in the botanical gardens in Paris, which abuts a small zoo. They had wondered into a rather overgrown dead end and were looking at each other wondering where to go next. They looked up to see a small crowd leaning over the wall above, looking down at them. A small child’s voice rang out:
“Oh look, mummy, this cage has got a man and woman in it!”
Which suggests to me that every zoo should have a man cage.
Also, when Gerald Durrell set up his zoo on Jersey he placed the children’s playground right next to the gorilla enclosure.
It seems the gorillas adored watching the little kiddies playing.
I’ll add to the list of literary/pop culture allusions the Robert Heinlein short story “Jerry Was a Man”.
Che Santino!
I loved the AK47 idea at first but then realized, if chimps are like people, the first thing he would do in his native habitat would be to turn the gun on his fellow chimps so he could rule over them.
Or he could stay in America; nutless wonder with a gun would fit right in.
Wow. You’d think that stunt would have earned him his freedom or something. Seems like chimps deserve a bit more respect than cats and dogs…
Then I wonder how the ‘hording behavior’ started? It would seem to me on the same level that PZ was disappointed the Chimp was castrated. But anyways, my basic point is people are still in this big mindset that we are so far separated from animals that when things like this show up it is shocking to them. Where as anyone who has a lot of animal experience are essentially ‘you just figured this out now?’
The culprit post is actually “A major change in stem cell policy”. The bad character is near the start of the second blockquote (Next to the apostrophe in “What’s this got to do with embryonic …”). It does indeed look as though it was a single-quote problem.
Wow, what an elegant solution.
I mean, who goes to zoos to see animals being as natural as possible?
Lots of zoos have methods for keeping monkeys and apes from throwing things like feces, notably plexiglass (cleaning it no doubt is noticeable in the budget).
Thought has generally been punished by humans, though, hasn’t it been?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
In my teens, I tried to write a science fiction story about a distant future in which certain primates had evolved to somewhere around the level of australopithecus, and the ethical problems we future humans (which I illustrated as bald and bulging headed) faced in dealing with them. I didn’t get far and it wasn’t very good, but maybe I should go back to it now.
I agree that this chimp needs more things to reduce boredom. I’m not sure if he has companions, but he definitely needs other chimps around if he doesn’t have them already. He should also have toys, maybe a pet, and a bigger area to live in. Or the zookeepers could buy him a subscription to World of Warcraft and then he’d never have time to throw rocks because it’s so addictive.
He is (was?) the alpha male and there are 5 other chimps.
Sometimes chimps do rage against the elements and address the sky in their “rain dance” displays. Proto-religion?
http://www.janegoodall.org/chimp_central/chimpanzees/behavior/rain_dance.asp
CJColucci,
Modern humans have already encountered other species more advanced than australopithecus. Neanderthal and Homo erectus were in Europe and asia when we emerged from Africa. Perhaps your story can be set in the past, and provide an improvement on Jane Auel.
“I think they should have taught him how to use an AK-47 and turned him loose in his native habitat to instruct his brothers and sisters in better ways to defend themselves.”
Don’t you hate it when serious posts remind you of funny songs? Arg!
Is it only observed as forward planning when there’s an easily conveyable measure like stockpiling ammunition or does it just make a better news story?
Not so surprizing: stories abound, but have not been compiled. Don’t we WANT to know the humility we should have as only one of three (or four, or five…) conscious species? If aliens landed, we wouldn’t expect them to speak English, or even to have any common reference in communication (Noam Chomsky), so how would we establish communications? We can’t even get on with fellow Earthlings!
I’m reminded of an old cartoon by Piraro that shows a zoo worker and an anthropologist with a notebook standing by the chimp enclosure watching the chimps constructing a catapult. The zoo worker says “Granted it’s an impressive display of engineering skill…, but what if it WORKS?”
An just so my comment won’t appear immediately, I add a linkfarm:
http://creativecreativity.typepad.com/geniuschimp/chimp/
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/02/chimps_new_arse.html
http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=502&sid=605445
Viva la Revolution!
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” — Wittgenstein
Someone else up thread may have already said this, but if they’d done that to me I would be really pisssed.
I’m had the same initial reaction as Ouchimoo @ 41. It’s not hard at all to come up with a handful of examples of animals “planning for the future”: building nests, hoarding food, migrating…
But then again, if they do these things on pure instinct, without any understanding of what the future might hold for them, does that meet the threshold of “planning”? In that case, maybe what Santino is doing really is extraordinary since it clearly shows that he’s acting not just on instinct, but on a prediction of future events.
Either way, you go Santino. Don’t stop making their lives hell just cause they nutted you. And if you run out of rocks, you can always go back to flinging poo.
Only tangentially on topic but I love Neko Case and it is about an animal kept in captivity. The Tigers Have Spoken. And for the kids out there, do not take the intro too seriously.
thanks for the post PZ. poor Santino, and i think one reason the incident is so resonant is because it lays bare a prevalent power dynamic in hierarchic cultures: if something is unruly, blame the victim and by doing so, validate the use of force. we do this to animals all the time, and we also do it to people. we may not literally castrate people (although of course sometimes we do) but we sure do figuratively. the castration also happens to women, btw – not in the weird Freudian sense, but in that patriarchy punishes women who embrace “masculine” traits like assertiveness and self-reliance.
Lawguy,
“Someone else up thread may have already said this, but if they’d done that to me I would be really pisssed.”
You may not be able to count on your emotions, since they will be changed by the reduced hormone levels. You should intellectually commit yourself to remember what the “real you” would have wanted and behave accordingly, not just for yourself, but for all mankind.
someGuy: “..bonobos, chimps, orangutans, elephants and other self-aware species deserve serious protection. We have a moral duty toward them. (Myself, I’d like to see the UN give this idea some very serious teeth.)”
Glen Davidson: “Thought has generally been punished by humans, though, hasn’t it been?”
PZ’s post a few days ago: Talk fast, we might be criminalized — “The UN has passed an absurd resolution that tries to make defamation of religion illegal. No more blasphemy for us!”
The UN, currently, is having difficulty in seeing its moral duty toward human beings.
i’ve used an AK-47, while wearing uniform. my drill instructors would have had no particular difficulty doing that teaching, no. they might even claim they had comparable experience…
(then again, part of the credit goes to Kalashnikov, too. his invention really is blindingly simple to operate and maintain; it takes real mechanical genius to design something like that.)
Not too surprising, we’ve got a lot of data on monkey and ape frontal cortex activity. They show activation in the principal sulcus of the frontal cortex when they are waiting to do a task which shows evidence of planning. The areas that light up in a monkey brain are pretty much the same areas that light up in the human brain while using working memory.
Don’t make him angry. You won’t like Santino when he’s angry.
Chapter 7: The Soul of Martha a Beast
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-7.html
You may not believe the following story but it really happened.
During the mid-70s my wife and were at the San Francisco Zoo and we made it a point to visit the chimpanzee exhibit. At that time there was a long, curved fence about three feet high and just inside was a water filled moat and then the exhibit itself, which was made to look like a shallow cave or rock shelter. There was just my wife and I at one end of the fence and three young guys, probably collage students, at the other. A couple of chimps were present and then a little door in the back wall opened and a third chimp emerged. He was much older than the other two, half bald with liver spots on his head and facial vitiligo.
The three kids at the other end of the fence began making fun of the old guy, pointing at him, laughing, hooting like monkeys and so on. This obviously pissed the chimp off because he peeled his lips back and started screaming at them, shaking his head and waving his arms around. He picked up what looked like a small sitting mat made of several layers of burlap sown together and started flapping it around an doing this crazy little dance. Then he rushed to the edge of the moat and hurled it underhand at the guys. One of them caught the mat and sailed it back at him.
By this time, a sizable crowd had gathered along the fence and we were all cheering the chimp on. The other two chimps just sat there watching the whole thing. The old guy once again picked up the mat, did his little ritual dance, then ran out and tossed it at them. Now they were leaning well out over the fence to catch it and throw it back. This went on a couple more times and it began to look like a friendly game of catch between man and monkey. We would all soon discover, however, that the game was anything but friendly and who the monkeys really were.
Finally, the old chimp did his dance and charged toward the moat and the three guys now leaning over the fence to catch the mat. This time, instead of throwing the mat to the guys, he swung his arm back and threw it behind him. Then on the down swing, he scooped up a pile of chimp shit (I don’t think any one even noticed it being there) and let fly. The poor guys never had a chance and each received his fair share. The crowd went absolutely wild, as did all three chimps who started jumping up and down, doing summer-salts and screaming. The three guys didn’t seem to share in the excitement but instead quickly walked away, brushing ape shit from their faces and clothes. That episode remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Sorry for the long story but when I read PZ’s post about Santino planing ahead, you can see why I wasn’t in the least surprised.
Of course they’ve been compiled. Two examples are by Eugene Linden:
THE OCTOPUS AND THE ORANGUTAN; More True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity. Hardcover: Dutton; Aug. 2002.
THE PARROT’S LAMENT; And Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity. Hardcover: Dutton; Sept. 1999. Softbound and 11 foreign editions
or did you mean compiled into a scientific study? I suspect that’s been done too, but I’m not a scientist, just an ex-bookstore owner. I’m sure someone will show up on the thread and enlighten us.
OTOH, this is a good examples of the “plural of anecdote is not data” problem. Not that I might not agree, but articles like this don’t convince me.
The chimp is a dick because he doesn’t like people walking by staring at him day in day out?
Sorry – I don’t want to be anthropromorphic, but it’s a rather difficult thing not to do with chimps. Actually, at times they act so much like humans that I’d prefer visiting with a gorilla.
Okay I’ll probably get lynched for saying this, I have a pet mink. A highly intelligent version of a ferret. But I want to tell a story of her thinking through a problem and her trying to outsmart us.
We fed her a few mice and when she was full she had one mouse left over. She wanted to hide it for another day. However she isn’t allowed to hide food in the rest of the house, especially rotted mice corpse. We had her in a small room with tile floors etc and we were blocking the door to the rest of the house. She immediately discovered she couldn’t walk out with the mouse. She stood there and stared as a bit and then turned and hid it behind a corner. Then walked up to the door and saw that it was open for her. Then she went and took the mouse and moved it to the center of the room nestled under the molding on the wall and walked up to the door, it was open for her. She then walked past the mouse to the other side of the room and then back to the door. We had no idea what she was doing. She then repeated this then her third lap she picked up the mouse and moved it half a foot in our direction. Then went to the door then back to the other end of the room then every time she crossed the center of the room she would inch the mouse closer to the door trying to be discrete as possible. Just a thought for anyone who thinks that animals who hoard just do it because some mind-numbed instinct pattern.
The immense concern over the loss of male genitalia – at points here being likened to lobotomy – could be considered a general male concensus that men (possibly humans?) think with their tackle. It’s as we thought girls, we don’t have a chance.
We’re all being curtailed folks and I doubt the keepers considered their solution a punitive measure. Captive breeding animals are valued so it couldn’t have been an easy choice.
I do wonder how a reduction in testosterone and aggression will affect him in his social circumstances. Whether he will be comfortable or not. I don’t know enough about this guy’s circumstances to judge anything.
I am also curious as to whether anyone speaking out at this giant insult to primate kind are significantly enough moved to consider opening a shelter to protect primates whose bollocks are at risk.
It’s only a matter of time before they start shooting back at the pig-cops.
Perhaps some would think twice about animal experiments if their bollox were on the line. Although many experimental biologists are female.
Thanks for that C.M.Baxter.
Hey – the exact same thing’s going to happen to me!
Just not an octopus, because they would be able to scheme joint land and sea operations.
That was actually my first thought too – “Oh god, don’t let them team up with the octopi, we’d be done for.” I have been reading Pharyngula way too much.
Could part of a solution be to put the animals behind two-way mirrors? That way people could look at them, but they wouldn’t be heckled.
Posted by: Ouchimoo | March 10, 2009 10:13 AM
That was exactly my reaction when I read an article about this last night. Considering we share most of our genetic material with this species, how flabbergating can it be that a member of it shows the most rudimentary of abilities in planning and expression?? And if it were me, and I woke up with no more balls, you can bet that there’d be an exponential increase in stones being thrown – with a higher-than-normal volume of poo right along with it…
Funnyguts @ #24:
So, you think zoos can and should “prevent” responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people? Great!! Taking out the economic incentives for conservation will pave the way for geothermal development in Yellowstone National Park, damming the Grand Canyon, clearcutting the rest of the Amazon rainforests, unrestricted whaling, lifting fishing bans on coral reefs, and trapping the last few chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, tigers, harpy eagles, whooping cranes etc. to put in those zoos.
Maybe we should also do away with zoos, too, and let anyone who’s still interested in wildlife watch Animal Planet, Discovery, National Geographic Channel and PBS? After all, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to preserve “awesome” images of wild animals and wild places than it is to preserve the animals and/or places themselves. If chimps and polar bears and humpback whales and such go extinct, so what? We’ve always got them on DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever.
/sarcasm
Besides the fact that zoos send mixed messages about conservation, the average visitor to the average zoo can and will do nothing to help preserve the wild counterparts of the animals they go to see beyond sending a few bucks to organizations like World Wildlife Fund or signing an online petition. Ecotourists are vastly outnumbered by zoo visitors, but their positive impact is vastly greater. Part of the money they spend goes directly into rural communities, making preserving wildlife and habitats for long-term benefits a viable choice over exploiting them for short-term gain or simple survival.
Indeed. I think it’s mainly the idiots who have convinced themselves that there is something special and magical about human consciousness. That it differs fundamentally from other animals, rather than just by degree. All it took for me to see that animals were intelligent was owning an Australian heeler. Once he was opening our back door with his paws(not a latch door, a knob), and remembered over the course of months where he had placed toys for storage, it was hard to argue he was just a ‘dumb animal’.
I’m reminded of the Dr. Demento song “Cows With Guns”.
Or the Eddie Izzard bit about sending chimps with guns into Charlton Heston’s house and seeing if it’s really the people or the guns that do the damage…
Phoenix zoo has a well-maintained orangutan exhibit (with behavioural enrichment, though they also let them watch TV). If people dropped things in the enclosure the keepers would trade treats if the orangs would give them the litter. The eldest orang now tears up dropped maps or leaflets so that she can trade each fragment for a treat.
“I think they should have taught him how to use an AK-47 and turned him loose in his native habitat to instruct his brothers and sisters in better ways to defend themselves.”
Interesting, coming from a Liberal. Especially since I doubt that you would advocate the same sort of thing for humans, or at least not for humans with political persuasions that might differ from yours.(*)
While I have nothing against folks owning AK-47s, I personally wouldn’t bother. Too expensive to buy, and too expensive to practice with. Impractical, and difficult to conceal. And I would never own a weapon that I didn’t practice with. On top of all that, there’s the hysterical Liberal “OH MY GOD IT’S AN ***ASSAULT*** WEAPON!!!!” to contend with (hearing “assault rifle” or “assault weapon”, is a fairly reliable sign you are talking to a Liberal). I’ll stick with a 9mm handgun as my main carry piece, a Mossberg 88(**) shotgun for home defense, and a .22 rifle for recreational plinking. BTW, the .22LR is a vastly under-rated round.
—
http://www.chl-tx.com
* Dr. Meyers: Anytime you come down to visit the Dallas area, I’ll let you attend one of my CHL classes free of charge.
** I see that this blog automatically inserts a “nofollow” tag in anchor links.
Ah, the sound of sarcasm as it whizzes obliviously overhead…
It’s a proper noun, now?
BrokenSoldier, TX CHL Instructor could not even spell PZ’s name right. He has been coming here long enough.
Or he really wants it to be, considering he went to the trouble of using it three times in his comment.
Janine:
It has always seemed a bit odd to me that they continue to spell it that way, considering it’s not only right here on the page, but also highlighted by hyperlink right under his picture. Maybe I give them too much credit for expecting them to take that much time to check their own work, though.
Indeed.
#93: Yes. Liberal (capital L) and liberal mean entirely different things. For instance, I could characterize myself as a radical liberal, but definitely not a Radical Liberal.
#94: My apologies to Dr. Myers for the typo. Spelling may be a lost art, but nevertheless it is not cool to misspell a person’s name, and I am sorry.
#92: Got you to look, didn’t I?
—
http://www.chl-tx.com
Working definitions of Liberal versus liberal?
At what, your comment? Indeed, as a Liberal(TM), I frequently tend to re-read those things which seem ignorant to me at first glance.
And until someone runs for office under the banner of a Liberal party here, there is no real distinction betwen the capital version and the lowercase verson, save for in the minds of ultra-conservatives such as yourself who so ofetn seek out the strawmen they’re so fond of knocking over.
Ah, yes, AK-47s. I happen to live in an area where there are a lot of people of different pursuasions (libertarians, right wingers, conspiracy nuts) who collect guns.
One day, at a bbq with children running around, the host proudly brought his new “toy” out to play, and was going to put it together to show his friends how it worked-in a suburban area. Just as he started to put it together, and his friends were “oohing” over the ammo, his wife came up, smacked him upside the head and told him to put the damn thing up. He started to get all manly, telling her who was the man, and it’s his right, and she just grabbed the case (which is kind of heavy) and threw it into the fish pond. Then she gave him a look I’d never seen before.
We need to bottle that look.
Or maybe castration might have worked on him afterall. Oh, wait. It doesn’t cure stupid.
I’m surprised no one in this thread has yet refereneced People Are Alike All Over- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Are_Alike_All_Over
a Mossberg 88 shotgun for home defense
Is it important for us to know the make and model of your cheap-ass plastic-stocked shotgun?
Too bad those zebra fish and other animals you experiment on can’t defend themselves, eh? They’d be heroes, too.
I just finished reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. It devotes a chapter to the astrochimps, some of whom were nearly impossible to tame and even broke out of their cages. Wolfe speculates that the chimps enjoyed their flights, primarily because for a blissful fifteen minutes or three hours, they weren’t being poked, prodded, and electroshocked.
#94:
“BrokenSoldier, TX CHL Instructor could not even spell PZ’s name right. He has been coming here long enough.”
There’s someone here called TX CHL that has posted annoying things more than once? Thank you to whomever started posting the Firefox kill file link!
It’s a fucking shame – but then, the way pretty much all non-human animals are treated by humans is a fucking shame.
Lynsey @ 80:
I, and I’m sure many other commenters here, would feel just as upset if they had given a female chimpanzee a hysterectomy in response to similar behavior.
When a male conservative starts talking about his guns on a liberal talkboard or blog the guy is suffering from severe penis envy.
And before you start questioning my manhood, TX CHL Instructor, I’ve qualified as Expert once and Master twice in centerfire pistol at Camp Perry.
Paper Hand#108,
Are hysterectomies used to change who the female is? Throwing a female into menopause would probably have the opposite of the desired effect, so she would probably be supported with HRT. This is an attack on who Santino is, so of course, HRT is not being considered.
Professor Myers,
Surely you’re not advocating (ahem) guerrilla warfare.
I can’t help thinking that if was a slave being kept in a cage a few years ago, we’d consider it barbaric and pat ourselves on our back that we don’t keep slaves any more. How long until the people of the future look back at us and consider us equally barbaric?
Yeah. My first reaction, too, was “yet another case of journalists believing it’s newsworthy that we are actually of this world”. Did everyone forget that (…cue comment 89…) chimpanzees make and use spears for hunting?
Somersaults. No summer, no salt, just an Old French leap.
Three years and a month ago on smirkingchimp.com:
DM: That would be a chimp war — a long-term war of attrition like the one Goodall documented. A gorilla war is just teenagers looking at each other moodily, and from time to time having a fist-fight behind the school.
So is it the .22LR or the short that is so well regarded by the Mafia, etc. as the best for assassination work?
If TXCHL also drives a Hummer then we really do need to consider how much overcompensation is too much.
To AnthonyK:
I would definitely recommend that book, but a few of your facts are a little off. (I’m currently a primate behavior graduate student at CWU, where I intern at the sanctuary talked about at the end of the book, and am currently taking a class from the author hehe)
“Female chimps have been observed teaching sign language to their children” really should just say that Washoe taught her adopted son ASL. No other case of this has occurred in chimpanzees who have acquired ASL, probably because none of the other chimpanzees who know ASL have ever had an infant of their own/adopted an infant.
”Chimps raised in human homes self-identify as humans. They will sort pictures of other chimps and humans into two piles. Pictures of themselves go with the humans.” This again, is something that Washoe did, not necessarily something all captive chimpanzees do. I have no idea if Tatu, Louis, Moja, or Dar do/did do this, or if any chimpanzees involved in other projects have ever been reported to do this.
Etc, etc. Besides reading the book, I recommend visiting the website and even visiting the facility sometime. (www.cwu.edu/~cwuchci)
To Tz’unun :
Although I largely agree with your assessment of zoos, ecotourism isn’t the shining example of conservation you’re holding it up to be. I’m currently working on my master’s thesis proposal to expand upon previous research done on the impacts of an ecotourism site in Anhui province, China this summer (Macaca thibetana, if your interested). Most of my previous peers have reported a clear decrease in the animals conditions, including vastly increased rates of infanticide, self-directed behaviors, inter-group aggression, etc (taken from 6 years of data with no tourists, 13+ years with tourists). Previous studies at other sites have shown some pretty drastic consequences too. For example, disease transmission is a huge issue with primate ecotousim sites, both to human and the non-human animals. (For example, look at what human introduced Ebola did to gorilla populations!).
Ecotourism does of course often have the benefits of getting money to the area and getting local people interested in the animal’s continued survival, but unfortunately most animal based ecotourism doesn’t end up helping local people very much finacially, who will still damage the animals habitat to try to make a living. This is really a side issue steming from government and park official corruption that is rampant at a good potion of animal-based ecotourism sites in places such as African, Indonesia, China, etc. Often (but not always) the people and animals involved get minimal portions of the funds.
As a side note, using mountain gorillas getting captured to put them in zoos is a poor example to support your point, not only because only western lowland gorillas are kept in zoos, but also the vast majority of primate collections in zoos result from zoo breeding programs due to the endangered status of the critters. People are not going out and catching them in the wild to send them to Texas (at least not legally).
As to responding the article, well…I’m certainly confused as to why they are describing this as the first case to demonstrating planning in non-human animals, because it isn’t. I’m too tired to respond much further then that now, which is sad because there is finally a topic presented that I have a decent amount of knowledge in. Oh well, ‘tis to be expect during finals week.
“Further covert surveillance of the ape revealed he spent some time tapping areas of concrete floor with his fist. Occasionally, the animal would thump harder, releasing chunks of concrete that he broke into rough discs…
…Santino’s attempts to fashion concrete discs has been recorded 18 times, according to a report in Current Biology.”
Lemme get this straight: This chimp is fashioning stone tools for use as projectile weapons?!? COOL! I have never heard of chimpanzees doing this. Has similar behavior been documented before?
Wasn’t that Nim Chimpsky?
there is finally a topic presented that I have a decent amount of knowledge in
come back after finals, pick a thread that has interest, but the primary subject has died down a bit, and launch away.
Being an animal behaviorist myself (fish), I’d certainly be interested in hearing the latest on this specific topic.
I didn’t realize they did this same test on Nim, but I do know they did that test on Washoe as well years before hand.
As for starting up conversation after finals, that does sound rather fun.
So … a chimp shows cognitive behavior not observed before in an environment where he could be easily studied and even perhaps taught to use his mental faculties more productively so they cut his balls off. Bastards.
How’s this for animal cognition. A friend of ours has a labradoodle who is smart for a dog and a very quick learner. They went for a walk with two other dogs and their owners. One of the other owners had one of those ball throwing sticks and two balls. She threw one of the balls and the other two mutts raced mindlessly after it. The labradoodle simply picked up the remaining ball and looked smug.
#108 Paper Hand
That wasn’t the scope of my original comment. Humans’ personal and cultural identity associated with their gender was. I thought the ease with which people related male castration with the heights of degradation and reduced motivation was interesting merely for the literary conventions. Which is why I made a crude joke about gender then an even cruder joke about inequality and why I hoped to get away with saying “tackle” and “bollocks” in the one comment. Context is everything in comedy. I’m citing no agendas beyond curiousity here though I am a big fan of males and their maleness.
Santino lacks many other freedoms in his life but we find this most poignant as it reminds us of our own sexual liberties and what they mean to us. Rather than the practical implications of keeping a chimp in an environment he’s not native to. It works really well as a story and way of highlighting the inequalities between how we percieve ourselves, other human beings, our closest relations and any other animal. The only sexual inequality about it is that if testicles weren’t involved it would have been less of a story.
Medinari @ #117:
Had you bothered to click the link in my comment, or even read the opening sentence carefully, you’d have noticed that I was taking the previous commenter to task for inappropriately using the term “ecotourism” synonymously with “nature-based tourism.” I would have expected some grasp of the distinctions between the two terms from a master’s candidate associated with a study of the impacts of nature tourism.
To clarify, ecotourism is the ideal to which all nature-based tourism should (but all too often doesn’t) aspire. There’s a broad bell curve from near-zero impact to outright exploitation, but the scenario you’re describing in China would clearly NOT fall on the ecotourism end of that curve. I spent seven years managing a nature preserve that was being “loved to death” and four years working as a zookeeper with a degree in biology in between, and I have served as a consultant on nature-based tourism issues, so I know from whence I speak.
As for the legality of capturing mountain gorillas for zoos, I’m curious as to why you singled that out as a “poor example.” Do you really think that geothermal development in Yellowstone National Park, damming the Grand Canyon, clearcutting the rest of the Amazon rainforests, unrestricted whaling, lifting fishing bans on coral reefs, and trapping the last few chimpanzees, tigers, harpy eagles, whooping cranes etc. to put in zoos are more plausible? And are you really implying that tourists, not bush-meat hunters or non-human sources, brought Ebola to the gorillas? May I see some documentation for that assertion, please?
I imagine our ancestors were chased by Santino’s ancestors and they had the nature skill of human to kill back.
You are lucky, Santino, otherwise i can try your meat. Monkey meat i tried, tasty and soft like Kobe beef. That’s your destiny as animal, to be eaten by human.
ha ha ha…..
I’m in absolute awe in the face of your grammatical incoherence, lieman.
Simple Simon the Idiot Lieman. Still at it. If you were smart, you would fade into the bandwidth. So we’ll see more of your stupidity later.
Interesting post. That passion for freedom, independence, and the ability to live ones own life as one chooses is so fundamental to humanity. I suddenly have the vision of a teenager and his/her parents…
-Alexandra
http://alexandrakent.wordpress.com/
“I imagine our ancestors were chased by Santino’s ancestors…”
Shame _your_ personal ancestor wasn’t caught by them. And you can shove your infantile “ha ha ha” up your bollocks. Assuming of course that you have any, which appears highly unlikely to say the least.