Hmm, must reassess my views on chimpanzees

I’ve never been much into monkeys and apes. I make exceptions for the mighty and sad gorillas (in the mist, and otherwise), and the orang-utans of SE Asia. But, regularly monkeys I find to be dirty and nasty, and far too concerned with their own genitalia.

Among the more overrated of their lot are everybody’s favorite showbiz apes, the chimpanzees. I frankly don’t like them. I don’t find them funny when they’re anthropomorphized, and any film of TV show with a chimp in it is not going to be watched by me. Furthermore, chimps in the wild are truly nasty animals, not to be trifled with. I say, let’s not trifle with any of them.

But then I read something about chimps the other day that kind of redeemed them for me. Chimps, according to the article, really, really hate clowns. Clowns at a circus have to be very careful to not walk past the chimps because the chimps will (literally) go apeshit.

That speaks well of chimps. For even if I have some antipathy for their species, I dislike clowns much more. Everybody of sense and sensibility hates clowns – or should. Clowns are not funny, they are evil. Chimps seem to know that at some sort of primal level.

Actually, it’s odd about such primal fears. They’ve done experiments with monkeys in which they stick a rubber snake in a cage with young monkeys – young monkeys raised in captivity who have never seen a snake in the wild – and the monkeys will go insane with terror at the faux serpent. That’s genetic programming for you. In other words, somehow the message gets through at a cellular level that snakes are greatly to be feared in the wild, and the monkeys who will never see the wilds, still have the fear.

Back to clowns. Were there bizarre jungle clowns that terrorized chimps in the past? It’s similar to the question one might ask about the common housecat: what were cats most afraid of before there were vacuum cleaners?

Oh, and about clowns. I make an exception for Krusty because he shows the true sinister nature of the clown in all its debauched hideousness. I like his honesty.