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Published on August 17, 2007 By Jythier In Wildlife
I can see it now. Movements saying apes are sentient, and therefore should live in our society with us. Leading to apes should have equal rights. "I can't help it - I was born an ape." Leading to Ape Suffrage. Leading to, what? "You can't marry him, he's an Ape!" "We're running away together!"

As Apes continue to learn to communicate with Humans, and interesting question comes to mind. Did Jesus die for Ape's sins, too? Have all Apes sinned?

I doubt it, but I'm sure people will start trying to convert the apes from their savage ways.

What I really want to know is, why is OUR way of life the BEST way of life for ANY sentient being? Why can't we leave the apes alone, and they can keep doing what they're doing, and we can keep doing what we're doing?

Also, are we now going to learn to communicate the way apes do? How come nobody bothered to do that, instead of making THEM, the ones we have considered the LESSER for so many years, learn to communicate like us? We're supposedly more intelligent - we ought to learn to speak Ape, not the other way around.

It's not like they WANT to integrate into our society. We're kind of forcing them into it, by keeping them in captivity.

This is exactly the reason I hope we never run into another race in space. We wouldn't be content to just leave them alone, doing what they do on their planet - no, we'd want some here, and for some of our people to go there, and try to get them to do things OUR way as quickly as possible.

Just think - if we accept the apes into our Human society, convert them to our ways... who won the space race?

I say, live and let the apes live. The only reason the ones in captivity are learning to talk is because they're so bored - in the wild, they would be having too much fun ape-ing around to bother with humans.

I think that already makes them better off than us.

Comments
on Aug 17, 2007
funny article.. great stuff here made me laugh, but in some ways it made me think too.
on Aug 17, 2007
Thanks MM, that's about what I'm about. Make you think, make you laugh.
on Aug 18, 2007
Jythier, just so you know, all the things you've seen me write like what I'm about to write here are written by the guy that wrote that article you read on my blog.

When he had come upon the earth, the ape was naked and afraid. For comfort he picked up a stick, chewed the end to a point, and stuck it in a nearby living thing.
2 When the living thing died, transfixed by the stick, the ape ate of its flesh and soon conceived a great hunger for the death of other living things.
3 Thereupon the ape made many pointed sticks and stuck them into great multitudes of other living things, including, on occasion, other apes.

What you describe, we do to each other as well, and have throughout all of history.

I have a friend, that when he would see someone do something particularly stupid, he'd shake his head and despairingly say "...give a monkey a brain..."

From the link above:
Adam Jones explains, in his book Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, that people throughout history have always had the ability to see other groups as alien, he quotes Chalk and Jonassohn: "Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant 'the people' to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals.
on Aug 18, 2007

I say, live and let the apes live. The only reason the ones in captivity are learning to talk is because they're so bored - in the wild, they would be having too much fun ape-ing around to bother with humans.


There's at least one community of chimpanzees that hunts with weapons, albeit extremely primitive ones, and there's a strong argument to suggest that chimps from different areas have social and cultural differences, suggesting they aren't governed solely by instinct.

As it stands chimps are already surprisingly like humans. It's probably just a matter of time before they become very like us.

We are of the same stock, after all, so really all those speech lessons are just reducing the cultural gap.
on Aug 18, 2007
I thought about laughing.
on Aug 18, 2007
... er... thanks, Mason? I think?
on Aug 30, 2007