If you ever get to the point where you don’t feel like you have enough to worry about, just scan the news headlines for a few minutes and you’ll find plenty of things to lose sleep over. The economy is still in a tailspin. Fresh military threats loom in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula. You can’t even eat peanut butter without worrying about getting sick.
And now it seems that we are faced with a brand new, heretofore unrecognized threat – the possibility of an interspecies war. We were all shocked to hear about the 200-pound pet chimpanzee that mauled a woman a few weeks back, but we probably all assumed it was an isolated incident. New evidence suggests that it may have been the beginning of a disturbing trend.
Consider the story of Santino, as 31 year-old chimp who lives at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. It seems that during his time at the zoo, Santino grew tired of the insolent humans laughing and pointing at him from behind the safety of their protective fencing. Thumping his chest and howling in protest only seemed to encourage the hairless yahoos who tormented him, so he came up with another way to show them his displeasure.
Early in the mornings, Santino would carefully collect a pile of rocks and set them aside while the humans lined up to “watch the funny monkeys.” Then, without warning, he would suddenly fill the sky with a hail of stones and watch contentedly as the hapless members of the “dominant” species scrambled for cover. When he ran out of rocks he was even bright enough to look for weak spots in the concrete portions of his habitat and knock them out to restock his arsenal.
Experts in animal behavior were amazed at the amount of planning, imagination, and forward-thinking Santino exhibited with his rock-throwing shenanigans. They aren’t sure if all chimpanzees are capable of this sort of creative thinking or if Santino is some kind of simian Einstein, but either way the cause for concern on our part should be clear.
We need to ask ourselves what will happen if Santino and his ilk ever get their hands on more lethal weaponry. You may find that line of thinking to be ridiculous, but how much more difficult is it to point a gun at someone and pull the trigger than it is to carefully select a well-shaped rock and hurl it at someone? It is not at all hard to imagine an ape of Santino’s caliber being able to figure out just what a gun is for and how useful it can be in influencing human behavior if he ever got his hands on one.
But, you may say, what human would be dumb enough to arm a chimpanzee and teach it to shoot? I say the surprising thing is that this has not happened already. We live in a world where people teach chimps to do lots of things that people do – wearing clothes, eating with utensils, smoking, even “talking” to us using rudimentary sign language. How far-fetched is it to think that someone, somewhere who has access to both a chimpanzee and a 9 mm will make that fatal leap in logic?
In fact, it is not difficult to imagine some of the more radical environmental and animal rights groups deciding to arm the ape world so that they may defend themselves from the oppressive human race on a somewhat more even footing. Anyone who has ever seen the “Planet of the Apes” movies may feel a chill run up their spine. Could we be on the brink of witnessing life imitate art?
I can’t say I’m enamored with the idea of taking a full-time job peeling bananas for our simian overlords, but it’s probably not the worst thing that could happen. Lord help us all if cats ever take over.
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