The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [233]
Conservation Status
The human is in no imminent danger. Due to its alpha predator status coupled with the ability to control its own climate, the human has ceased to evolve, thereby effectively removing itself from nature. Currently, the only palpable threat to the human is the human.
This imagining, however, will probably never come to be. There are laws against things like that—human laws. Laws that would prevent keeping a group of humans in captivity for purposes of public education and entertainment. Such an idea would violate our notions of ethics, which have always struck me as problematically anthropocentric. The chimps and the humans at the zoo are separated by that wall of glass because the chimps might harm the humans were there no glass. Albeit the same (it is almost too obvious to point out) could be said of humans and humans. However, humans only imprison other humans after the humans in question have proven themselves to be harmful to humans. If one were to apply the same logic to human beings as humans do to animals, then we would have to preventatively imprison everyone from birth. Then we would all be safe.
On an early afternoon in Chicago in late March of 1999, I, Bruno, stood and peered through the window that looked into the chimpanzee exhibit in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. I peered through the window that looked into my childhood home. My old wordless world, my animal habitat. I looked through a three-inch-thick sheet of glass at my biological family. It looked much the same as I had remembered it, although I’d grown upward by about a foot and outward by more than fifty pounds, and so the space looked even smaller than I’d remembered it. I saw—and remembered as I saw—a ledge, a certain wide flat metal shelf bolted to the wall in a corner, very high up near the ceiling in the interior part of the exhibit, accessible via the ropes and nets that hung from the ceiling down to the cedar-planting-chip-covered floor: we chimps would often scramble up those ropes and nets up to the shelf, muster ourselves on top of it and huddle there together in the winter months, napping, grooming, lazing around all afternoon long in a languid tangle of embraces. It was March now, and cold outside, though not bitterly so, and all the chimps were inside, and most of them were huddled together on top of the shelf in the corner, just as I had once done. The shelf, as I recall, was a favorite place of ours, in part because its height probably reminded our instincts of the tree canopies in which we would have been taking our naps if this were the jungle and there were predators afoot below us, and in part because its height made it one of the precious few areas of that Benthamite panopticon where we were not totally in view of our spectators. Of course the people could still see us—they could see that we were up there, could see our hands dangling off the edges of the shelf and could catch glimpses of the imperceptibly moving mounds of our warm breathing brown bodies—but at least we were not fully exposed up there. I looked up to the shelf, and I saw my family—my old family, my mother, Fanny, and my father, Rotpeter, my aunt Gloria, and my uncle Rex—huddled together on top of the shelf, several gangly purple hands and gangly opposably-toed feet poking out of the ball of appendages to dangle limply off the edge of the shelf. Down below them, on the ground, scratching and digging in the steamy urine-sodden carpeting of cedar planting chips, were two chimps whom I did not recognize. New additions to the zoo. One, a female, looked like a teenager—probably around my age, actually—fifteen years old. The bloated wad of pink flesh that she dragged along the ground beneath her advertised her fecundity, and a little brown button of a turd protruded shyly from her anus. The second new chimp was the infant she held in her arms.
I stood so close to the wall of glass that the brim of my hat touched it. (I was wearing the same coat and hat that I had once found in a closet in little Emily’s