Stressed Baboon and Son: "A baboon mother's `over-zealous' grooming of her baby to baldness at a Devon zoo is a sign of stress, says an animal rights group. Reggie the hamadryas baboon has had his hair licked and plucked off by his mother at Paignton Zoo. Now PETA has called on the zoo to stop hamadryas baboon breeding. The zoo rejected PETA's call and said the baboons showed no signs of stress."
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What an ugly monkey.
That explains why Dick Cheney is bald...
HAHAHAHAH! You just made my day!
Wow. The resemblance is striking.
Right, because it's perfectly ethical treatment to keep them from breeding. Absolutely.
As ethical as forcing them to have sex!
We're not talking about pandas. We're talking about primates. If there's one thing primates are good at, it's having sex.
Humans are primates as well. If there isn't a drive to have sex, it most especially isn't going to be there with animals, who as far as I can tell don't have the capacity for fantasy or closing-your-eyes-and-thinking-of-the-queen that humans do.
Interesting when you see PETA talking about animal welfare for a change.
You mean as opposed to "rescuing" animals they proceed to "destroy"?
I can't tell whether they enjoy being their own parody, or if they just aren't aware of it. It's as if there were a well-capitalized "childfree" NGO.
That's ironic. At last night's Negativland show, they did a skit where they shaved a monkey completely bald "live on air" to prove the resemblance of people and monkeys, evolution, etc. It was quite funny.
Maybe she did it on purpose, thinking that if it looked more like the mostly hairless apes that wander freely, it too could be free.
-t
I like this take on the situation very much indeed.
I know the feeling.
baboons showed no signs of stress
What??? I don't know much about monkeys but I know enough to know that the baby baboon in the picture could use an ape-sized does of whatever SSRI medication the zoo health care plan covers. That poor boy. He looks like he's been working in a legal library for 30 years. It's so sad. Get him away from that mean and crazy mother. I'm not sure what the zoo is thinking. Let me tell you, unless that boy grows into those ears and gets a chance to grow some hair back he's not going to be breeding with anyone.
Don't ask me why, but you know who the baby reminded me of?
Maybe he heard the next Wallace and Gromit was going to be live action. The real test would be to see if he can do the windshield-wiper excitement move while yelling "Gromit!"
a workmate: "Kinda looks like Prince Charles".
I've seen cats over-groom their kittens to similar effect. No photies, sorry. Although I have a notion of a "baconpussy"...no, wait,
yay!
no, wait...
yeah, thats stress alright. common stress behavior in most primates (including people). same thing happened to a chimp in zimbabwe (?zaire? i forget) who got shell shocked from mortars going off near the refuge. picked his hair clean off.
so in this case, PETA's right, the bastards.
These comments can be summed up as:
"Humans look like other primates. Surprise!"