Swompdonkey

Beware of Chimps

A few weeks ago I was watching the Kratt brothers' show "Be the Creature". If you didn't know, the Kratts are two quasi-interchangeable naturalist brothers who host children's wildlife programming on more than one network.

Anyway, this show is dedicated to developing a certain empathy through mimickry--immitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose. And this time, the subject of their flattery was the chimpanzee, which, we are told, is our nearest living relative in the animal kingdom. If so, much of human behaviour that I don't understand was explained for me during that half hour.

During the first half of the program, the brothers spent some time with some chimps in a sanctuary for orphans, roughousing and playing with the beasts. Then in the second half, they dragged a camera deep into the jungle to observe the creatures living in the wild, and the two clowns "aped" them-- if you pardon the expression -- climbing, scampering, rooting for food, calling out chimp-cries. Then, about 45 minutes into the broadcast, things got nasty... when the chimps went on a hunt, the young viewers were treated to the horrifying spectacle of the brutes leaping from tree to tree, seizing monkeys, and rending them limb from limb. The Kratts somberly informed us that as "omnivores", the chimps ate both meat and veggies. And how! These ones seemed to have a predilection for monkey tartar... or rather tear-tear, as that's what they did as they shared the bits of monkey between them, pulling limbs apart in a grotesque jungle tug-of-war.

This jarring image came rushing back into my head as I read this report of a Canadian being injured and his driver killed in a chimp attack in Sierra Leone. For all their cuteness, these are some dangerous and unpredictable beasts, which can turn nasty at a moment's notice. Is it any wonder we think of them as man's closest cousin?