Recently in Monkeys Category

Sure they're cute in their little monkey suspenders, but chimps are amazingly strong.

And as sadly demonstrated a few weeks ago whe a chimp nearly mauled a woman to death, they can be nasty.

But exactly how strong are they? Figures range from five to eight times stronger than human, a figure which doesn't really make sense when held up to scrutiny. I mean, yeah, sure, they're that much stronger than me, but I sit at a desk all day long and the only thing I ever lift are potato chips.

An interesting article in Slate magazine examines the issue. Yes, they're stronger than the strongest human, but not THAT strong.

A chimp on four legs can easily outrun a world-class human sprinter. But it sounds extreme to suggest that humans are only an eighth as strong as chimpanzees. Consider that a large human can bench-press 250 pounds. If the "five to eight times" figure were true, that would make a large chimpanzee capable of bench-pressing 1 ton. It's just the sort of factoid the zoo staff might tell you to keep you from knocking on the glass.

Photo from Slate.com 

Sure, we all think it'd be cool to have a pet monkey, but it's one of those ideas that's probably left in the realm of fantasy.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but one that a lady in Connecticut learned this week when her pet chimp nearly killed her.

The animal weighed 200 pounds, so maybe the trick is to get smaller monkeys.

The story ends badly for the chimp.

NEW YORK, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Police shot and killed a 200-pound (90-kg) chimpanzee that had once starred in television commercials after the ape nearly killed its owner's friend and attacked a police cruiser.

The victim, Charla Nash, 55, was in very critical condition from the biting and mauling attack on Monday, said Captain Richard Conklin, a spokesman for police in Stamford, Connecticut, a New York City suburb. Her injuries were life threatening, he said on Tuesday.

Owner Sandra Herold, 70, tried to stop her rampaging pet, Travis, by stabbing him with a butcher knife and hitting him with a shovel but the chimpanzee fended off the attack and then stormed a police car that had responded to the scene, Conklin said.

 

We don't have Taco John's restaurants are here and I've never seen one, but I've seen their commercials.  They star  a monkey in a cowboy suit that rides a dog.

Whiplash was knighted Thursday night in St. Paul by the Winter Carnival royalty at Tom Reid's Hockey City Pub near the Xcel Energy Center.

In a successful bid to attract customers, a restaurant in Japan has hired an army of monkeys to wait on tables.

The plan, albeit disgusting, is being met with enthusiam from customers. The simians only work two-hour shifts, which is more than some of the monkeys I got working for me here.

Be sure to check out the video. And pay no attention to the fact that the person who wrote the headline has absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is.

And the service couldn't be any worse than what I got the other day at the drive thru.

Ok, we can all agree there's nothing funnier than a chimp wearing human clothes riding around in a Segway. But here's my question: How come videos from Japan always have people in the corner of the screen laughing and pointing?

Who are these people?

It seems like only five months ago that I wrote about the world's oldest gorilla. That's because it WAS five months ago.

Anyway, 55-year-old Jenny has died at the Dallas Zoo. I hope I make it to 55, but that's a lot of blogging I'll have to do.

The article described her as being sweet, but bossy. Except for the sweet part, that sounds just like MY boss. What else do Jenny and I have in common?

DALLAS - The oldest gorilla in captivity, a 55-year-old female named Jenny, has died at the Dallas Zoo -- her home for more than half a century, a spokesman said Friday.

Zoo officials decided to euthanize Jenny on Thursday night because of an inoperable tumor in her stomach. Jenny had stopped eating and drinking recently, and tests showed she was unlikely to recover, spokesman Sean Greene said.

Jenny's keepers described her as very sweet though a little bossy.

Moe, a chimp that gained notoriety a few years ago when two other chimps attacked a human who was celebrating Moe's birthday, has escaped.

He's been missing since he left his home in Devore last week. Although he was innocent in the birthday attack -- which was apparently a fight over birthday cake -- Moe is not exactly the kind of monkey you'd want to run into by accident. He's attacked people before. In 1998, he bit a police officer and a woman in two separate incidents.

It would have been really funny if their names were Curly and Larry.

I realize the odds of Moe turning up in the South Bay are pretty slim, but if you happen to see a chimpanzee wandering down Lomita Boulevard, don't call the police. Call me. I'll take him home with me and let him drink all the whiskey and smoke all the cigarettes he wants.

And when other chimps come over for parties, I'll be sure to have plenty of birthday cake for all of them.

They're small, cute and throw poop --  the difference between baby monkeys and baby humans is pretty tiny.

But monkeys don't grow up and join gangs, go to college, pierce their noses, get tribal tattoos or other obnoxious things humans do these days.

I was sitting here at work just now when a commercial came on for a show called "The Outsiders. "It's going to be on at 10 p.m. Tuesday. That's pretty much all I know about it, but the premise of it seems to be that a lady realized that monkeys are less trouble than humans, so she adopted a monkey.

The monkey eats at the table, drinks out of a glass, goes to the playground and wears dresses (which I suppose makes it a girl monkey.)

This is the best link I could find and I don't know how long it's going to last. It's for the Primetime series. If you poke around, you'll find a video called "substitute children." That's the one about the lady who is raising a monkey.

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.
Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to human

OK, enough with the monkeys. I'm tired of them. No more Monday Monkeys from me. If I find a good video, I'll post it, but I can't handle this kind of responsibility.

For our final episode we offer a dog and a monkey duking it out. Guess who wins?

Actually, this just kinda looks like a normal night at my house.