Get Ready!

Everyone you meet will tell you how smart monkeys are, but you know what? Smart is relative, isn’t it? 

I watched this one baboon eat a plastic bag for about fifteen minutes, and this other one ate things he found in his friend’s butthole. So… 

What I will concede to is that they are busy. Very, very, busy. 

They are constantly doing stuff, and all that activity makes them an absolute pleasure to watch.

However, it's the grooming that wins the day.

The grooming and self-cleaning is so frantic and so constant, that it’s like someone told all of them, “Listen: the whole point of life on this planet is to look absolutely perfect, always. Your fur needs to be pristine at all times, so you’re gonna need to examine yourself and your family constantly. Don’t let anything slip through the cracks, failure is not an option! Check every inch!”

There is so much body examination going on, around the clock, that it makes most primates an addictive treat to behold. I guess I always assumed that nature shows on television over-focused on the grooming aspect of a monkey’s life, because it’s so funny and interactive, but that all the monkeys ultimately went and did something else -- something different -- for the remainder of the day. Maybe something unrelated to grooming.

But no, as far as I could tell, the grooming never ends. It happens before, during, after, and in between all other activities. Take these chimpanzees, for example. It’s as if these chimps have been cursed to forever be getting ready. Getting ready for what? That we don’t know. But they are getting ready, and they are doing it thoroughly!

Even with the FAMILY OF LOWLAND GORILLAS that I visited in the misty mountains, frantic and fastidious grooming was the activity du jour. They would check each other and then re-check each other. Then, in their downtime, they would start examining and reexamining themselves.

Whether it’s baboons, monkeys, or chimps, the underarm cleaning/nitpicking is always my favorite, because it is guaranteed to involve awkward positions and a ton of exaggerated expressions of boredom and fatigue.

Let's Give 'Em A Hand, Folks!

I am going to play devil’s advocate here and suggest that any animal with human-like hands is already going to appear much smarter to us than one without. Personally, I know that I can certainly watch an animal with little hands and feet for exponentially longer periods of time. From raccoons to primates, you find an animal with little hands and opposable fingers, and suddenly, I’m in it for the long haul.

Forget the fact that raccoons are spreading my own trash across my own yard, or that the baboon is picking munchies out of a friend’s butthole, I’m in.

And yes, I’ll even find myself thinking, “look how smart they are! They undid that latch and opened up my trash like it was nothing! How clever!” or, “They all seem to like the things in this one monkey’s butthole the best, how discerning they are!”

It occurred to me, what if tons of other animals are just as smart? I bet you there are plenty of other animals that would love to get inside my trash (or a friend’s butthole) and probably know exactly what needs to be done, they just don’t have the hands and the little fingers to do it! I suspect they are mad about this.

Imagine being stuck inside a body with hooves. You have big dreams and big ideas about all the things you’d like to create, all the things you’d love to do, if only you had hands... but you don’t!

Then, all day, you are forced to watch the animals that do have hands use them not to hijack a Jeep and take it on a joyride (or a thousand other awesome hand-centric activities you’ve thought up), but instead just use them to fiddle with butthole bugs and incessantly groom each other. It would be maddening!

As entertaining as it is, you can only watch so much grooming. But just when I thought I’d had my fill and couldn’t possibly watch or photograph anymore preening or butthole-digging, we encountered a baboon that decided to make things interesting. It pounced up on our Jeep and seemed to have a plan. Huh. Maybe one of the hoofed animals was able to communicate the Jeep hijacking idea after all!

After that, I no longer trusted any of the animals. Every time I saw a bunch of baboons spread out in the road, I just knew it was probably some kind of elaborate trap. I was waiting for them to even start pretending to be hurt or something, all so we’d slow down or pull over, and they could make their move.

I went from saying things like, “Awwww! They’re adorable, slow down!” to “Roll up the windows and step on the gas! I suspect foul play here!”

Looking at some of their colorful, almost evil faces (a few even have large, wicked fangs!) I started wondering how we could have possibly managed to totally skip over baboons in the superhero realm. Really? Going down the list we got to wolverines and even a human/ant hybrid before these mischievous, sinister monkeys?

But then I’d see one turn around, and remember, ah. That’s right. Any costume designer or creature designer would inevitably halve to figure out how to address the unfortunate baboon backside. As much as I’d love to see Paul Rudd in a little assless spandex baboon suit, I can see how many production designers would rather just avoid that headache altogether.

Also, I will admit that hyper-focused, incessant grooming is a weird superpower to incorporate into an action plot line.

“Timmy’s fallen down a well? Why, if only there was someone here who could quickly clean all these fur coats and also pick small items out of a butthole; that way we could help Timmy by— Paul Rudd? Is that you? Why is your ass exposed…?!” Timmy’s only eight years old! He might be stuck in a dark well, but he’s not blind, get out of here!”

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If you're all jazzed up, too, and want to keep learning, you can read more about these animals and their gangland activities HERE; or about how they steal human ears and wear them as trophies HERE; or learn about what it's like to track lowland gorillas in the misty mountains of Uganda HERE. Who knows? Maybe you'd like to go and meet them yourself?!

I know they'd love to get ready for you.