Thought of the day :Santino`s Rebellion

From Santino in Sweden

The Hindu, Delhi carried a report on March 11, 2009 from the Guardian, U.K. about Santino, a chimpanzee at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden, whose behaviour has astounded some scientists.  What was Santino’s behaviour ?  When visitors to the zoo approached his enclosure he would get upset and start throwing stones at them – stones gathered by him from within his enclosure.

 

This was okay, but   the scientists were

surprised when it was observed that Santino calmly   and deliberately collected stones from his enclosure before the visiting hours began and collected them in strategic piles near the visitors’ viewing area for future use.  The scientist thought this was unknown in animals, and that forward planning for future is an exclusively human activity.

When zookeepers covertly removed these piles of stones, Santino thumped the concrete flooring of his enclosure to loosen out discs and pellets of concrete to be used as stones.  This was reported in the journal Current Biology. “Many apes throw objects, but the novelty with Santino is that he makes caches of these missiles while he is fully calm and only throws  them much later.” Santino behaved like this only during the zoo season, and gave it up completely when the zoo was shut for  winters.

Well, we know that scientists can be baffling creatures, even downright silly , as in this story.  Any sensible reader of this story will understand Santino completely.  To be forcibly uprooted from your native home and put on display for idle, snotty, schoolchildren with their complacent schoolmarms, other idlers, lovers, lunatics, moonlighting salesmen, bored wives, pensioners, policemen and retarded scientists will try the temper of anyone – to hell with scientists` notions of  correct “animal behaviour.”

It is clear that Santino objects to his imprisonment, but out of stoic good nature has perhaps accepted this temporarily.  But it becomes too much when this alien human backwash stands ogling at you shamelessly, shouting and jeering at you asking for some performance  from you, throwing soggy sandwiches, chewed chewing gum, biscuit wrappers, boring newspapers, empty coke-cans and such unecological desiderata at you all day.  Even the easiest going person will be forced to retaliate –  in self defence, which is a valid plea even in human jurisprudence.  Remember, even during the arctic winters, so violently opposed to the warm tropical native places of Santino and his kinsfolk, he is his calm and genial self, sportingly staying within the “known” boundaries of animal behaviour.  The surprise of the scientists is surprising.

And this brings us to us humans.  What are the boundaries of our “human behaviour”, and under our obvious unsalutary conditions what abnormal behaviour is being displayed by us ?

 

 Well, this one is a bid difficult.

To begin with, humans were never in some god-given “natural” habitat or, in other words, when we were in our natural habitat we were actually chimpanzees  — like Santino , not human .  It was precisely by learning to survive by using stone and wooden tools — like Santino , that we distinguished ourselves from apes and became human.  We reappropriated, or refashioned, nature in our main business to live and survive.  Of course, we have actually misappropriated it so much that natures’ own abilities to survive are now in peril.  Our question thus gets translated into this : why did this happen ?  Was it inevitable, or were we put into and maltreated in some sort of a zoo — like Santino ?

There are two main schools of thought on this .  One group of thinkers says that all that we have done, and do, is due to our inherent “human nature”. The other group says that we are, and can be, okay if our shackles and maltreatment  is taken away.

           That much maltreatment is the order of the day in human species  is pretty clear.  That over three-fourth of the species goes hungry when there is enough land and enough knowledge of agriculture to feed everyone is the foremost oddity.  That over three-fourth of the species remains ill, unhoused, un-educated, unemployed while the wherewithal to provide all this is plentiful is grotesque.  That it is economically and therefore politically impractical to provide all this is weird indeed.  Try explaining this state of the world to a schoolchild to realize how weird.  Compared to all this, Santino’s case is of a simple imprisonment.

Such an enormous and abiding calamity is due to “human nature”?  Or Genetic Code, or Destiny, or Karma, or the Original Sin — or any of such explain – it — all speculative causes ?  Hm?

There is a famous philosophical dispute from ancient India.  On encountering a longish sticklike object on their path –- a common experience of any Indian villager particularly during Monsoons -– philosophers argue about whether it is a stick, or a snake.  Equally, valid arguments were counter- posed to   prove that it could just as easily be a snake as well as a stick.  A third argument was that it was neither, only Maya.  The philosophical dispute remained unresolved – and remains so till today.  Yes, this is true ! Check it out.

The point is that these leisured philosophers do not have the urgency, or the courage, to simply pick it up, to see if it is a snake or a stick.  They ignore the philosophical power of action.

Santino, the chimpanzee in Swedish zoo, preferred action over speculation.  Descendent from him in a sense, we should perhaps learn something  from him? Hm ?