I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Bow is fit and trim, even though he eats a wide variety of foods. He has plenty of access to fruit, including apples, bananas, strawberries and grapes regularly, and occasionally pears, persimmons, pomegranates, avocado, kiwi, guava, locquat and any other exotic fruit we can get our hands on. But he is not exclusively a frugivore. He eats salad with ranch dressing, eggplant fried in oil or bacon fat, raw tomatoes, fried onions, boiled cauliflower and boiled brussels sprouts, and asparagus, baked potatoes and yams, plus other vegetables that occasionally appear on the menu. But Bow is not a vegetarian. He also likes baked chicken, roast beef, pork chops, Big Macs, chicken nuggets and any other meat dish that he can get his hands on. And Bow has milk with his cereal and in his oatmeal and black sesame porridge, as well as whipped cream with his strawberries and sour cream with his baked potatoes. No, he's not lactose intolerant, and he is not a vegan, and he is not kosher; he has a nice appreciation for many different kinds of food, including oriental dishes like hummus and tahini and Chinese pot stickers and rice. Like me, Bow is an omnivore. He enjoys food, and he has routines and rituals, but he is not stuck in a gastronomic rut. He feels free to explore new foods.
And like me and my daughter, Bow is not overweight. He has a well-defined waistline and is built like the cartoon character, Li'l Abner.
Notice Bow's well-defined waistline
What I have noticed is that when they cross-foster, most people end up with great apes whose weight issues are a little like their own. It is usually because we tend to feed our nonhuman apes the same sorts of things that we eat, and also our attitude toward food is similar. It's a cultural issue.
Cross-fostered chimpanzees get a lot of their attitude and approach to life from the family they grow up in or the persons who raise them. For instance, a chimpanzee raised Catholic will take on Catholic ritual, crossing himself and praying before meals. A chimpanzee raised by a Buddhist will often display Buddhist attitudes and behaviors, even to the the point of looking like the Buddha.
Is it bad to look so happy and content that you no longer have a visible waistline? It depends very much on the culture you come from, how this is regarded. People are too quick to judge.
What if I told you that a certain great ape, deprived of the company of the humans that he loved, has lost a prodigious amount of weight and is now looking healthy and fit? Let's say he had before been so round about the middle that he was beginning to resemble a statue of the Buddha, but now he is fit and trim and his coat is glossy, and he runs around with his fellow apes outdoors, a perfect specimen of natural health and fitness. Is this good or bad? An improvement or an infringement?
When the Red Cross sent the Swiss Consul to visit the internees at the Weihsien Internment Camp for Enemy Aliens run by the Japanese in Shandong Province, China, he had similar improvements in the health of the inmates to report.
When people are placed in an internment camp or a sanctuary, good animal husbandry demands that they be given at least the minimal number of calories per day to live on, but not much more. If these people, when they were free, were accustomed to eating a great deal more than was good for them, then the resultant weight loss can lead to improvement in their overall health. In the same way, lack of access to alcohol and drugs can cause an improvement in the health of those of the internees who were addicts before they entered the camp. The camp has the same effect on the overall health of the inmates that a drug rehab center or a spa can have. But that does not mean that the lack of choice imposed on the inmates is brought about by humanitarian means or that it is in any way humane.
Although I was never able to see more than about four deer at a time, it was mainly due to my limited vantage point, standing in the doorway.
In the evening, when the light was fading, I saw the troop again. It is a whole herd of deer that are grazing on my land, and who choose my front yard in particular as a place to congregate.
Can you see Nile the cat watching the deer?
The deer were trying to be quiet, so that I would not notice them. I was trying to be quiet so the deer would not notice me. But Nile the cat was completely uninhibited. He was meowing loudly, startling us all.
Why are there so many deer in my front yard all of a sudden? "Did you put a salt lick out for them?" a friend asked. No, I have done nothing to make this spot attractive.
I am beginning to suspect that it's not what I've done, but what I haven't done. I haven't tried to shoot them. It's deer season now, and they somehow have figured out that my property is a safe zone. So while there is nothing here to attract them, they see it as a temporary sanctuary.
Yes, sanctuary. Not like a chimpanzee sanctuary, to which the chimpanzees are forced to go and from which they are never allowed to depart. But a real sanctuary, to which the deer go of their own free will when they choose to, and depart when they feel safe going elsewhere.
The difference between a sanctuary and a concentration camp is that you are free to come and free to go.
The peony has finally bloomed. Yesterday, by the end of the day, it looked like this:
The black garden ants are no longer attracted to the flower and have moved on. I wrote a retrospective about the whole process, and you can read it here:
When I first noticed the black garden ants patrolling the peony flower head, I had not idea what they were doing there. My friend Susan had to point out to me that they were helping the flower to open and were enjoying its juices all the while. This is an example of mutualism. It is also an example of how temporary mutual benefit should work. I find this highly instructive, in view of other insect models we have been cited as something to pattern our lives on.
People take all sorts of examples from nature, and depending on their preferences, try to apply them to mankind. For instance, in another blog I am following, on Mother's Day there was a piece on self-sacrifice using a spider as an example:
Yes, there are spiders who offer up their own bodies as nourishment for the young. Some people see this as a heartwarming example of altruism, but personally, I find it a little grotesque. Altruism of this kind is not attractive to me. On the other hand, I like the temporary mutualism of the black garden ants and the peony. I especially appreciate how there are no hard feelings once the mutual benefit is over. The ants just move on. There are no recriminations: "You used us when you needed us, but now that you don't need us, you're sending us away empty-handed! We feel exploited!"
Instead, perceiving that there is no longer a benefit here for them, the ants move on. The ants have other sources of food. The peony is just one of them. They do not actually need the peony, nor does the peony in truth need them, but both sides benefited immensely from the relationship while it lasted, and all is good.
I think that ideally employment should be like that. People sometimes want extra money and benefit immensely from having a job. Other people sometimes need help getting a task accomplished, and they benefit from having people work for them. So long as both sides are happy, they should stay in the relationship. But employees should not regard the employer as their only source of sustenance, and employers should not think that they get to have people work for them forever. As soon as there is no longer mutual benefit in the relationship, each party should be able to move on.
The problem is not just that sometimes people think they should have a job, because they "need a job", which is a euphemism for saying that they want money and does not take into account the rights of employers to discontinue a position. The problem is also that employers sometimes think they "need" employees and try to make sure that employees do not have other ways of life available to them.
I think the whole business of penalizing people for living off-grid is an attempt to make sure everybody will always need to be employed in order to pay the bills. That is just as bad as employees thinking they are entitled to a job. "Slavery is a leash with a noose at both ends." Recognize the quote?
Forced dependence of anyone on anyone else is a nasty thing. The essence of the concentration camp is actually such a forced dependence. It goes beyond slavery, to something even worse: uselessness.
The maternal relationship is sometimes seen as the model for all other relationships, but people forget how temporary that relationship actually is. Dependence by young on a mother is designed to last only long enough to bootstrap the new entity while it acquires the skills it needs to make its way in life.
Which brings me to the kitten. I am a little worried about the kitten, because I have noticed that when I put the food dish down on the floor, the kitten does not immediately know where it is. It goes all around the dish in circles, until it finally finds where the food is and sets about eating hungrily. I hope this just means the kitten is inattentive, not blind. It will need to be much more efficient at locating food if it is to become an independent hunter.
If the kitten is not able to learn how to hunt, then it cannot live on its own. In that case, it will have to become owned or die. The case of individuals who can't provide for themselves and will always need help is a special one. To the extent that they are dependent, then they also cannot be free. Sometimes that cannot be helped, But we should not foster universal dependence of all people on all other people.
So what about Bow? There is no question that Bow is not independent right now. He is still an adolescent, so it's not that big a problem, but there is no reason to think that he will ever be independent, The important thing for Bow is to be with someone who finds him useful, so that paying for his keep will not get discontinued. Unlike other researchers, I do not consider the project over and done with, and I will not stop supporting Bow, no matter what. But for all the exotics who are currently being confiscated from owners who love them and therefore have a use for them, and are being shut up in government run facilities, the situation is much worse. Even in the so-called private sanctuaries, you have to wonder what will happen when their public funding runs out.
Not every concentration camp is intended to be an extermination camp. Sometimes people really do intend to treat others humanely, only it does not work out this way. I am currently researching what happened in an internment camp run by the Japanese in China during World War II. The Japanese did not intend to starve their prisoners, but as they started losing the war, they could not afford to give them much food. It's not the intentions that count. It's the results.
Here's what I'm really getting at: animal rights activists say that ownership of animals is evil because they liken it to slavery. While I will admit that slavery can be a very ugly thing, it is not the worst thing that can happen to someone. The worst thing is to be thrown into a sanctuary or a camp or a centralized facility where no one can find out what is really happening to you. That is my worst fear, not just for me and other humans I care about, but also for Bow.
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