In a twist on the old “Man Bites Dog” story, we have a smoking chimp. I know that we all laugh when animals act like people, but how about if they act like caricaturely trashy white folks? Do we take the libertarian viewpoint and let them do whatever they want as long as they are not affecting others? Or do we take the more liberal perspective that animals cannot be trusted to know what is best for them and thus need to be told how to act? (And as much as it pains me to say so, I lean to the left on this one. If you leave animals to their own devices before you know it they’ll all be trying to kill each other. It will be ’survival of the fittest’ before you can say “Marlin Perkins”.)

For the record, the above picture is real (and if you think this is a bit of photoshop work, click here to see full video clip.) Charlie, a grown male chimp at the Bloemfontein Zoo in South Africa likes to smoke cigarettes. (Well, I’m not sure if he really likes smoking as by now it might just be an addiction that he’d like to kick). Charlie picked up the disgusting habit after years of watching zoo visitors smoke and then picking up their discarded butts. I guess he figured if he was going to put himself in the high risk category from the second hand smoke anyway he might as well give the real thing a try.

Charlie reminds me of that bear in Washington who liked to raid beer chests of campers and was found by game wardens last summer passed out after drinking 36 cans of Rainier Beer in one sitting. (Binge drinker).

Charlie and the binging bear need help. Certainly a first step is government regulation and intervention. Chimps should not be allowed to smoke nor should bears be allowed to drink beer, let alone binge. But we also need to get the message out to the future Charlies and binging bears and can only do that with a massive taxpayer-funded advertising campaign.

Finally, we need the Los Angeles Times to somehow blame this all on California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as they do pretty much everything else. Come on [LA Times resident novelist/columnist] Steve Lopez, you’re getting lazy if you can’t step up to this challenge. It should be noted that the Times loves binge stories so much so that they’ve even been known to fabricate them.

And don’t get us going about how marginalized most animals are under the current Republican administration…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 10:05 pm by Insider and is filed under Funny ... to us, Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.