Me.
Would a medical doctor (for humans) be allowed to see a chimp? It seems to me he would be more qualified than someone who usually take care of dogs or cows, wouldn’t he?
It would seem to me that without specific training, treating a primate would be dangerous to everyone (people and animals) involved.
I’m not sure that it would be any more fun to be raped by your monkey as beat up by it.
Thank you for this - without it I’d never have read the following quote:
The mind boggles. I’m trying to imagine Moe’s speech at the reception…
Read Next of Kin by Roger Fouts for some insight as to the frivolity which will ensue should one attempt to domesticate a chimpanzee. Personally, I wouldn’t even go anywhere near anything other than a baby chimp.
Chimps are great until they hit puberty. Then they make human teenagers look like fluffy bunny rabbits.
Notice that every time you see a “tame” chimp on TV it’s a pink-faced prepubescent chimp. Once they reach adulthood they’re much too dangerous to use in TV commercials.
In my experience the main problem with keeping a tiger in your living room is thatAAAARGHhhhhhhhhh…
(burp)
i met massa in his later years. he was quite the cranky “get off my lawn” old man.
he was one very mixed up gorilla. it took time to get him to stop wearing clothes and he couldn’t deal with other gorillas and when natural habitats started he couldn’t deal with them either. he did not like the outside much. he lived most of his life in a smallish room at the great ape house.
she had taught him some house skills like dusting. he would “dust” his room sometimes, with leaves or peels.
Too right. My parents knew a guy who was a serial adopter of baby wildlife, which in sixties Uganda could be quite varied. At one point he had a chimp, which would often pass the time by absent-mindedly flexing a car tyre like a bullworker. Even as a tiny baby, if it put its arms round your neck and then didn’t want to be put down, you were stuck with it for the duration. The idea of having something that strong wandering round your house is just nuts. Ironically, this chap (who also owned a leopard and other things at various times) was apparently nearly killed by a dik-dik.
I’ve heard that they can actually make great pets. They are apparently quite intelligent and have some vaguely dog-like pack behaviours that make them quite amenable to domestication. However I am :dubious: about ANY animal being owned by someone who is not very knowledgeable about them, and I think the number of hyena experts is probably much smaller than the number of people who think they would make a ‘cool pet’. Probably a non-intersecting set, to boot.
I could say the same about pitbulls. Still, they have a lot of fans.
Here in Indonesia, there is a research facility dedicated to reintroducing domesticated oranguatans into the wild. Often they are from circuses, etc. but also from people who got them when they were small and then quickly realized they had no way of keeping such a beast in their apartment. A lot of them get passed around and have been abused.
Well, I think that technically the state would investigate/charge/prosecute for practicing veterinary medicine without a license. Assuming, that is, that there was an MD stupid enough to want to do this. Keep in mind that a huge chunk of non-human primate medicine is about restraint of the patient.
Why the hell not? If we can teach Koko to sign, surely we can teach her to bench press.
I’ve only ever seen Massa’s statue at the Philadelphia Zoo and read about him in the book about the zoo, The Peaceable Kingdom. I’d like to have actually seen him before he died, but I lived considerably farther from Philadelphia than I do now while he was alive.
The film Buddy follows Linz’s attempts to raise a different gorilla. The film combines the two gorillas that Linz tried to raise, Massa and Buddy, into a single animal. The film is highly fictionalized…I think the Linz family didn’t approve of it very much. The real Buddy was disfigured by a sailor on the ship that brought him to America and had a perpetual snarl, which helped his career as Gargantua after Mrs. Linz sold him to the Ringling Brothers circus when he became too much to handle.
Coming from someone whose user name is the same as a famous signing chimp, that’s a very strong statement.
Ah yes, international waters, home of the offshore monkey knife fight.
“Furious George! What have they done to your beautiful face?”
I held a baby tiger once at a roadside zoo. My wife and I were driving through Oregon ina rainstorm and pulled off at the zoo because it was the only nearby prospect for a drink and a restroom. Because there were no other guests, the keeper (who was a just a little over-enthusiastic) said, “would you like to see the baby tiger? Come on!” and led us into the enclosure. Knowing that this was how Stephen King short stories started, we nonetheless followed.
The baby tiger, who was about the size of a schnauzer, walked up. The keeper exclaimed, “would you like to hold him? Here!” and scooped up the tiger and thrust him into my arms.
I was holding the tiger like I would a human baby, and he reached up with his enormous front paws, grabbed me with surprising gentleness on both sides of my head, leaned up, and kissed me.
Visions of an imminent and bloody demise ran through my head, but I emerged unscathed. No claws, no teeth, and no tongue. I just got fondled and snuffled. I offered the tiger to my wife, but she indicated that she was content to stand there and take pictures of me.
I have to say, the baby tiger was adorable. Soft and fluffy, playful, sweet-tempered. If the slightly unbalanced keeper had said, “take him home! We’ll get another one,” I would have been sorely tempted to stuff him in the back seat and go.