NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
February 18, 2009
Ape & man
My reader may have been struck by an item of breaking news yesterday. Travis, the trained chimpanzee, star of Coca-Cola and Old Navy commercials, and of the pilot for a TV series, badly misbehaved at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.For no immediately discernable reason, he attacked a favourite family friend, as she arrived in a car. She was seriously and permanently maimed. The 90-kilogram animal shrugged off a butcher-knife attack from his mistress, in defence of her friend. When paramedics arrived under police protection, the chimp attacked the police. He cornered one policeman in his cruiser, and was shot by him in self-defence. Travis then retreated into his house, where he was later found dead. The excuse was offered that he was on meds, for suspected Lyme disease. He had previously escaped custody, however, and caused considerable confusion while at large, in 2003. The animal, raised from "childhood" in a human family, and trained to behave "just like a person," could open car doors for people and the like. We have all seen, at least through the media, various stunts performed by "man's closest surviving relative." Chimps can put on a beret and smock, and imitate a painter; they can learn to recognize many human words, and manipulate them in entertaining ways. What were once circus tricks are now presented, by stone-faced exponents of Darwinian "science," as evidence that man is not "ontologically unique," that the radical distinction between man and all the other animals is only a figment of the religious imagination. It is still circus tricks, however. You can teach an exceptionally bright and patient chimp to use brush, paint and easel, precisely as instructed. But left to his own devices, he does not go on to do paintings like Lascaux. Instead, he does roughly the same composition over and over, in return for delicacies. Ditto with every other trick, presented as some "scientific breakthrough" by publicity-seeking Darwinists with a philosophical worldview to sell to a gullible audience. The zoologists among them are not nearly so gullible themselves, as one may determine by reviewing the standard procedures in any professional zoo, for when chimps, among other clever animals, get out of their enclosures. Animals that cannot be safely retrieved, are shot. Likewise, in Africa, the keepers of animal sanctuaries must remain constantly aware that their orphaned, human-raised apes and other animals are potentially lethal to the tourist who is fat and naïve. (Or even, thin and naïve.) The notion that chimpanzees, dolphins, and so forth, are "liberals" with respect to our own species, has been deeply inculcated in postmodern folklore. If the size relation between Taupey the Cat (a temporary guest in my apartment) and her feeder were reversed, I wouldn't count my chances with her, even if I continued to feed her promptly. Style being a constant, size can count for a lot. I am so old that I have seen a cow milked with my own eyes. Well, actually it was not milked with my own eyes, but by the hands of an old-fashioned dairy farmer. But I can nevertheless attest from that experience, and another with a cart-pulling bullock, that the bovine ungulates are not nearly so docile as their reputation. (Bullfighting is a useful reminder of that, and like all such reminders is under threat from the vegetarians and animal-rights types.) Thanks to the Internet, one may now have one's fill of -- for example -- videos displaying what a large, irritated octopus can do, when he suddenly decides that a diver has become too personal. Even the playful shark has been known to behave aggressively on some occasions. And I read somewhere of a man who died after being savagely attacked by his hamster. (Blood poisoning was involved, as I recall.) Mother Nature herself is not entirely benign. She is merely free of the moral compunction that makes members of one of her species -- homo sapiens sapiens -- ontologically unique. She has not been briefed to honour or reciprocate our sentimentalities. And as people used much better to appreciate, a wild animal remains a wild animal, even when bred in captivity. That humans can behave with consummate savagery -- and moreover, with a calculating efficiency vastly beyond that of any other animal -- I have also observed. Travis was just a chimp, not evil; his "crimes" were the result of a human miscalculation. Whereas, the human murderer is evil, not a chimp; and his worst crimes are no miscalculations. This point would appear to be obvious, when looked at plainly, and yet it contradicts almost everything our children are now taught in school. For if they learn only one thing about the chimpanzee, it is that he shares 98 per cent of his genetic coding with the human student. That is an interesting factoid, but it explains absolutely nothing about the nature of the respective beasts, or of their common Creator. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top