[Note: This is the fourth sample from my rough draft of a far
from finished new book, Wild Free & Happy.
I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while. My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and
you are very welcome to explore them.
The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents
of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or
subjects.]
Orangutans
Our orangutan cousins in Sumatra spend about 90 percent of
their time in the trees, where they are safe from hungry tigers. Living in low density, often solitary, they
enjoy a peaceful life, free from the emotional aggravation of living in an
anxious crowd. Of all the apes, they are
the least noisy, usually silent. They
move through the trees at a leisurely pace, never in a hurry. There is always something to eat in the
rainforest. On average, females give
birth every eight years, a longer spacing than any other mammal.
Orangutans are very intelligent. Researcher Biruté Mary Galdikas said, “I’ve
had this feeling, ever since I was very young, that the tropical rainforest
represents the original Garden of Eden.
Our ancestors left the garden, but orangutans never did. They maintained a childlike innocence that
humans lost a long, long time ago.”
Sadly, a mob of palm oil tycoons are furiously replacing the
rainforest with palm plantations, mostly in Borneo and Sumatra.
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees can grow to a standing height of 5.5 feet (1.7
m), weighing up to 130 pounds (60 kg).
Males are larger and more robust than females. Chimps spend most of their time in the
trees. Because of their size, they are
less speedy and graceful at leaping through the tree canopy, compared to
smaller primates. So, when they want to
visit somewhere not close by, they go to the ground and knuckle walk.
Humans evolved for living on the ground, and are optimized for
long distance running. While chimps are
smaller than humans, their arboreal lifestyle has made them far stronger. One experiment found that the arm strength
of male chimps is five times that of humans.
Big heavily muscled human wrestlers cannot hold a chimp still, even a
young four year old.
Frans de Waal warns that “Having a chimp in your home is like
having a tiger in your home.” When
chimps feel threatened by a human, the human is in danger, and if he attempts
to defend himself, the chimp will be even more brutal. Outdoors, when humans appear to be harmlessly
passing through, chimps generally ignore them.
Chimp bands are dominated by an alpha male, who is often
backed up by one or more alpha wannabes.
From time to time, the alpha is challenged by lower status males, one of
which will eventually dethrone the cocky king of the harem. When the alpha is defeated, the new alpha
often kills the infants of nursing females, so they will become fertile sooner,
and produce offspring having his superior genes. An alpha tends to be abrasive to everyone, to
intimidate them, and assert his control.
When male strangers make an appearance, they are welcomed with teeth,
fists, clubs, and stones. In skirmishes
to defend territory, chimps are sometimes beaten to death.
Bonobos
Bonobos and chimps live close to each other, but their
rainforest habitats are separated by the Zaire River. The two species have never met in the wild,
because neither can swim. They look a
lot alike, and until 1929 were thought to be a single species. Chimps far outnumber bonobos, and their
territory is much larger. Male bonobos
can weigh up to 86 pounds (39 kg), and females up to 68 pounds (31 kg).
The bonobo culture is strikingly unusual for primates. Their groups are matriarchal. Males are second-class. Females determine how food is shared, and
they eat while the males wait. Chimps
have sex only when a female is fertile.
Bonobos have sex almost anytime, several times a day, with anyone
interested, young or old, in every imaginable way. Because of this, it’s impossible to know who
your biological father was. So, no
youngsters are deliberately killed.
Bonobos are incredibly lucky.
They live in a habitat with abundant food, and no serious competitors in
their ecological niche, an ideal situation that does not encourage
competition. Chimps live in leaner
lands, and compete for food with gorillas and baboons. They feel the squeeze of crowding, and they
reduce this pressure by infanticide, and by killing or driving away competitors.
Primate
Diets
The first primates evolved from small nocturnal insectivores
that gobbled bugs during the dinosaur era.
Today, all primates are omnivores, consuming both plant and animal
foods. None are vegetarians, but
gorillas are primarily leaf eaters (folivores).
Most primate species are mainly fruit eaters (frugivores). Tropical forests typically provide a year
round supply of fruit, so most primates live close to them. Fruit is 75 percent of a chimp’s diet, and
sugar is rapidly converted to energy.
It’s interesting that human babies have a preference for things that
taste sweet, a relic of our tree dwelling days.
Protein is an essential nutrient for primates, and it is
mainly acquired by consuming animal foods, and certain types of leaves. The primary source of animal protein is
insects. When insects are abundant, they
can provide up to 90 percent of a healthy primate’s diet. Meat is a high quality source of protein, far
superior to plant sources. It takes less
effort for our digestive systems to utilize the protein from meat. Some primates are good at predation, killing
small animals. Some are scavengers,
dining on the leftovers of carcasses abandoned by carnivores.
While plant foods are most of their diet, bonobos also eat
caterpillars, earthworms, shrews, reptiles, bats, flying squirrels, and small
forest antelopes (duikers). Chimpanzees
also eat insects, birds, eggs, monkeys, duikers, bushbucks, wild pigs, and
carrion. Baboons also eat insects, fish,
shellfish, rodents, hares, birds, vervet monkeys, and duikers. The orangutan diet includes more than 400
types of food, but it majors in ripe fruit.
They sometimes dine on invertebrates, like caterpillars and worms, and,
on rare occasions, meat. Gibbons feed
mainly on fruit, but also consume leaves, insects, bird eggs, and sometimes
young birds.
Hominins are unusual primates because some species learned
how to kill and cook large animals. This
was made possible by their experiments in tool making, and the domestication of
fire. Unlike other primate lines,
hominins are able to digest big servings of highly nutritious animal
foods. Shepard Krech noted that the diet
of Native Americans could sometimes include six to twelve pounds (2.7 to 5.4
kg) of meat per day. For employees of
the Hudson Bay Company, the daily ration was seven to eight pounds of
meat. Of course, the diet of wild artic
societies consisted almost entirely of animal foods.
The
Bottom Line
Non-hominin primates did not make complex weapons, strive to
exterminate predators, spread around the world, enslave other species, invent
agriculture, explode in numbers, live in filth, and die by the millions from
infectious diseases. They did not wage
war against infectious diseases, soar into extreme overshoot, load the
atmosphere with crud, and blindside the planet’s climate. Instead, they continue to inhabit a niche in
their ecosystem, and live as they have for millions of years, without rocking
the boat. This is nature’s way.
Somewhere along the path, hominins began exploring new paths
that eventually led them farther and farther from nature’s way, into dark and
dangerous realms. A growing number of
the cool new tricks we discovered had uncool consequences, eventually
triggering disturbances that not only rocked the boat, but rocked the planet. Edward Abbey said, “Man is literally undoing
the work of organic evolution.” This is
the opposite of intelligent.
The accelerating frenzy of half-clever experiments has
catapulted human modes of living to places far outside of the time-proven design
encoded by our genetic evolution (hardware).
The long parade of naughty booboos was the result of an impulsive
adolescent fling with cultural evolution (software). I don’t believe that our hardware is fatally
flawed. Our software is, without a
doubt, a deadly threat to us, our descendants, and the entire family of life.
In the coming decades, our operating system is going to
crash, again and again, because of its countless bugs. Before long, our radicalized blind faith in
utopian techno-fantasies will be thoroughly rubbished by the nightmares we
created with good intentions. As life as
we know it melts down, even stupid people (hopefully) will come to reject our
culture’s fantasies. What should we
do? Any bright ideas out there?
The disintegration and abandonment of the failed culture will
create a vacuum, an opening for new modes of being, which must be radically
different, radically simpler, and ecologically wise. Now is a good time to be contemplating how things
got to be this way. Now would be an
excellent time for serious efforts to learn from our many mistakes. Repeating the same mistakes, generation after
generation, is so embarrassing for critters with big brains (blush!).
In the following chapters, I’ll sketch out my interpretation
of the human saga, from the perspective of humans as animals — not the Crown of
Creation. Happy trails!
