Monkeys on the Lam – The Weird Side of the Internet

Monkeys on the Lam – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I am not an idealist. I want to be, and maybe the wish to be an idealist is itself idealism. But I’d like to say that I’m a realist, actually an optimist with an educated hope for the future.

We like to think that human nature will for ever doom us to an entropy no matter the future, but I think that we are nicer to each other now than we were. But we still have to do barbaric things, and one of them is use animals for medical research. I’m sure scientists would take any alternative, I don’t think that science is cruel, but animals get used for medical research until we can give experimental antacids to robots.

But when lab animals escape, aside from wondering what zombie virus they’re carrying, I kind of root for them. I hope that one will rise up like Spartacus, and somehow they got really smart in the labs. Not Planet of the Apes smart, but smart enough to make it interesting.

So 43 Macaque monkeys escaped a medical research lab in Savannah, Georgia. They got 24 back as of November 10^th. The rest are just screwing with them on the outside of the fence. Someone didn’t lock the gate, but it would have been cool as hell if they had just learned to jimmy the locks themselves. They’re about 7 pounds, as big as a cat. If they were smart, they would go find circuses. There’s probably a law that if a monkey reaches a circus, it gets sanctuary. And a funnt hat. That ought to be a law.

See, when I said I was an optimist, I mean that in a handful of years, we’re going to have some synthetic biological lifeform to poke and prod, inject and cause to ingest, and we won’t need medical monkeys anymore. But then we’ll probably be asking ethical questions for creating living jelly just to sprinkle the latest blue pill on it.

Original article here.

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