Chimps

ed. note-- written during Dan's course, while staying at Sweetwaters-Ol Pejeta ranch which is in the same (large-scale) neighborhood as Mpala
I have a tendency to anthropomorphize most of the animals that I see or study. I empathize with ants, nature's successful communists*, and lizards, who live the life I want to lead when I am 90, but it is particularly easy with mammals, because they really are like humans. According to other mammals, at least, mammalia includes some of the most intelligent species, like dolphins and elephants. Whenever we run across a herd of elephants, a certain train of thought automatically runs through my mind: How many steps away from civilization are these creatures? Do they need any new parts, or can they make do with their trunks and all they need is a bright new idea? If they had already established civilization, would we know about it?
So, I was really excited to see the chimp sanctuary at Ol Pejeta, because in my mind, chimps are basically humans that don't get it yet. They have just about everything we have, anatomically, albeit their pelvis needs some adjustment for permanent bipedalism. They even have tools and all that. Seeing the chimps would be like going back in time and seeing wild humans. And of course, that idea leads to all sorts of crazy fantasies about learning to work with chimps and holding workshops to show them how to farm and how to build houses for themselves and how to manage theater productions.
Unfortunately, given the time constraints and the barrier of a giant electric fence, none of those workshops got off the ground. Also, actually seeing them blew my notion of chimps, or at least these chimps, being receptive proto-people. Apart from the two males who did a team-effort rock siege of our Land Rover, the chimps we saw didn't seem to have much ambition. A few of them were lying on the ground, and would turn over occasionally, and quite a few were picking leaves off of acacias and eating them. One was sitting on the ground hugging itself and rocking back and forth, in typical crazy-person fashion, which gave the impression less of this as a blossoming community of chimp creativity and progress, but more of an outdoor asylum for those animals not fit to be members of society. To be fair, though, if you looked in on a group of people stuck in a cage in the middle of the woods, they would probably be doing just about the same things. And, really, when you think about it, trying to get chimps to be more like humans would probably be bad for humans and chimps.

*from whose example we can conclude that communism would have worked if only everyone was related, and female, and only one member of the nation reproduced