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28 Feb 2009 - A Chimpanzee makes a nice pet if you can keep it off the furniture...and Granny.
I Won't Follow Animals Advice... Talking Heads were right to say that.
Even worse though is the advice available from animal activists who are long on finger wagging and short on facts - like the ignoramus who once told me that "Hippopotamuses are harmless herbivores" in response to my daring to mention that they killed more humans than any other animal in Africa.
This kind of thinking (if you can call it that) has obviously extended to chimpanzees.
To be honest, I've never given them much thought myself, but if you'd asked me to picture one my brain would have automatically produced an image of a movie chimp, probably one wearing a nappy and doing something cutely human like smoking a pipe.
Germaine Greer, if she remained consistent to her claim that the stingray attacked Steve Irwin as the result of a group decision by the animal world would probably argue that the recent attack on a woman where a chimpanzee ripped her friend's hands and face off and ate them was some kind of class action as a result of a committee of chimpanzees deciding that enough was enough - they were through being laughed at and wanted to be viewed in quite a different light altogether.
So who's laughing now?
Once again, David Byrne showed remarkable prescience when he wrote:
I know the animals are laughing at us They don't even know what a joke is.
Auntie used to say: "It's always funny until someone loses an eye", so I guess it's fair to say the joke's over when the monkey leaves you eyeless and needing a face transplant.
What I'm wondering is: how did we get to this state of utter dumbness?
Was it all those anthropomorphizing Disney films which were sold to us as nature documentaries but were really sugary works of fiction which made animals out to be just so very cute because they did some things just like we do...?
Is it because we're so cut off from the natural world in the big cities that human beings have no idea how wild animals really behave...?
Is it those scientists who keep on about how genetically close to us they are...?
The expert responding to the question posed by Scientific American says having a chimp in your home is like having a tiger in your home.
But because we've been told over and over that they're so like us, it would appear that impressionable dimwits think they can relate to them just as we do to each other... (and look how well that works out a lot of the time).
If you have a falling out with your friend, that can be ugly, but imagine if your friend has arm strength five times that of a human male, two sets of hands to grab you with and incisors designed to rip raw flesh from living bone.
By the way, if you think this attack on the unfortunate friend of the woman who was having a none too natural relationship with the chimp was an isolated incident, Google around and discover otherwise.
Finally, given the coverage accorded the When Good Monkeys Go Bad story and now the attention being paid to the issue of sharks biting bits off humans around Sydney harbour, isn't it only a matter of time before a local men's magazine asks some starlet the question: "If a chimpanzee fought a shark, who would win...?
Remember Born Free? Those lions were semi-tamed, but still highly dangerous. They were treated for wounds where necessary, raised on a bottle if orphaned, etc. but could never truly be trusted. And its not just the wild animals that attack. I read of a stallion who was fed a treat every day by his handler. The day the handler forgot the treat was the day he was attacked and killed.
