I know! It seems like every few months they do an expirement that shows just how close monkey/ape and human behavior is, but this has to take the cake.
Here is another one, less funny but just as interesting: Monkey Math Methods (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9912319/).
Knowing all of this, it saddens me that we have these monkeys in zoos for people to gawk at. If they feel social pressure and know enough to pay in order to look at monkey ass, then they probably know they're being exploited! That troubles me, but at the same time, I think it's important to have places where people can learn about animals.
It's interesting you should say that, because the kids and I went to the National Zoo here in DC just the other day, and it is much more of a sad place for animals than the Houston Zoo. In Houston, they have done a good job of keeping the monkeys in their natural habitat, with the cages just to prevent them from escaping. I think the monkey exhibit there is my favorite. They've done this for most of the other animals as well. (I take the kids often because they like it and I like that they learn about nature conservation, etc.) But the National Zoo is much more of the old model, with the apes (I haven't seen the monkeys yet) in cells in a house with concrete floors and walls and ugly old trees. I would rather have to go back several times to see an animal because its hiding in the brush and trees, than always have it front and center behind a plate glass window in a concrete cell. To be fair, the National Zoo has a very natural panda exhibit and is working a on new exhibit that looks like it will be a lot more natural, but since this is the National Zoo, I would have thought they would have done this years ago.
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chromodynamics) wrote2005-11-03 04:00 pm
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Here is another one, less funny but just as interesting: Monkey Math Methods (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9912319/).
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