Discuss: Lunch with Cheeta
9 comments
I worked one summer at a tiny zoo in northern California - many of their animals were rescues from the entertainment industry. The most popular was Bill, a 50+ year-old chimpanzee who had been rescued from a circus that had passed through town - the local school children had raised money to buy him as he was getting too dangerous to continue in his circus act. Bill had a television behind the main part of his cage, and he watched it regularly. When elephants were on TV, he would become very agitated. He also reacted very strongly to seeing African American visitors to the zoo - in that special way chimps do, by flinging his poop. In my mind, these seem to be signs that he clearly remembered being captured as a young chimp in the wild in Africa, and probably witnessed his parents being killed…. Of course you can’t know what is causing this reaction, but it makes you think.
Chimps have intelligence, form strong bonds, and long memories - we have mistreated these close relatives for too long. It’s nice that some can live out their long lives in “retirement” (no matter which movies they were in or not in - that seems like a trivial point when looking at the bigger picture of an animal taken from the wild and used in any way for our mere entertainment.)
I worked one summer at a tiny zoo in northern California - many of their animals were rescues from the entertainment industry. The most popular was Bill, a 50+ year-old chimpanzee who had been rescued from a circus that had passed through town - the local school children had raised money to buy him as he was getting too dangerous to continue in his circus act. Bill had a television behind the main part of his cage, and he watched it regularly. When elephants were on TV, he would become very agitated. He also reacted very strongly to seeing African American visitors to the zoo - in that special way chimps do, by flinging his poop. In my mind, these seem to be signs that he clearly remembered being captured as a young chimp in the wild in Africa, and probably witnessed his parents being killed…. Of course you can’t know what is causing this reaction, but it makes you think.
Chimps have intelligence, form strong bonds, and long memories - we have mistreated these close relatives for too long. It’s nice that some can live out their long lives in “retirement” (no matter which movies they were in or not in - that seems like a trivial point when looking at the bigger picture of an animal taken from the wild and used in any way for our mere entertainment.)