“Monkeys: Totally Cute or Weirdly Disturbing?”
ColleenP wants me to write about monkeys. I don’t know why, and I’m suspicious, but…okay????
Thing is, monkeys are both, aren’t they? I mean, they are close enough relatives to homo sapiens sapiens that their cute faces and arms and legs and adorable, mischievous hands resonate in our hind brains as “adorbs.” Yet they are different enough that they also look wrong somehow…too small, tails, oddly structured. They just move weird, and that’s disturbing.
Which is why in popular Western culture they are both cute (Abu and Raffiki, courtesy of Disney movies) and scary (flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz, which okay, are kind of kitschy but when you’re a kid they can be damned terrifying, okay?). Everyone was upset when the monkey ate the poisoned dates in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everyone is also creeped out by vids of monkey troops swinging through the tree tops.
I’ve heard as pets they are too smart for their own good and can create total catastrophic havoc at will, and so I think I’ll stick with dogs, thankee.
As a grotesque aside (do not read if gore bothers you): While my father was in the military he had to complete a jungle survival course, since as a pilot headed off to Viet Nam it was paramount that he knew what to do in the event he survived a crash. It was the one survival course that he nearly failed, because the only easily caught animals his team could trap with any regularity were, you guessed it, monkeys.
My father was a hillbilly who grew up helping to kill chickens for dinner and butcher hogs at his grandfather’s farm and hunt bird and game with his brothers in the woods. He was no stranger to skinning and eating, but he refused to eat monkey because when you skin it and cut off it’s tail, it looks like a human baby. Poppa starved himself instead.