• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As my good friend Izzy Landes has pointed out, if lovers can have a morning-after pill, why not boozers? Why not, indeed? Is not the alleviation of suffering, whatever its origins, a noble cause?

In any event Ms. Feeney-Morin has succeeded once again in riling up the animal rights contingent. My phone did not stop ringing this morning for more than ten minutes. One gentleman asked to speak to Dr. Mengele before launching into an abusive tirade. To those making more respectful inquiries, I stated that Bert did in fact undergo a successful detoxification process — admittedly, more like two steps than twelve — and has rejoined his fellow chimps as a functioning member of that community. It’s more than you can say for a lot of people out there.

This continuing fuss has made it clear to me that we need to proceed as expeditiously as possible to find places for the animals still on the premises. Back a couple of years ago, we had a sizable population of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, not pani-cus) that a somewhat demented keeper, one Damon Drex, tried to induce to wax literary. (Mr. Drex, I hear, was recently released from a mental institution and has gone to work for a zoo.)

When I became Director, I decided to close down the Primate Pavilion on the grounds that chimpanzees, whatever their DNA reads out to be, are not human, and have no real place in the Museum of Man. I objected, diplomatically, of course, to the neat paradigm proposed by one or two of the older board members that the Pavilion represented man’s distant past, the museum proper his recent past and present, and the Genetics Lab his future.

The Primate Pavilion is now simply known as the Pavilion, although it still contains primates, mostly human, who occupy the same offices built for Damon Drex’s typing chimps. We have leased much of the space to Wainscott at a very good rate, thanks to arrangements worked out and insisted on by our new counsel. Indeed, the premises don’t look all that different than they did before, what with people in their cubicles bent over computer screens. One big difference, of course, is that there are no droppings on the floor.

But there are still some rhesus cages upstairs, and the old, unconverted part of the ground floor, with its doleful cages and rather pathetic inmates, still exists. Plus ça change, plus la même chose! And, under strict supervision, these animals are licensed to the Genetics Lab for experimental uses. Under strict supervision from the appropriate state and federal agencies, I might add.

In other words, we still have in residence a number of troglodytes. To oversee them we appointed Dr. Angela Simone as the Ruddy and Phyllis Stein Keeper of Great Apes, the endowed position Mr. Drex previously occupied. A well-respected primatologist, an attractive young woman with a sympathetic manner, Dr. Simone is devoted to her charges and punctilious when it comes to treating them humanely. She realizes that her duties are to be phased out gradually. (What we will do with the position, I’m not sure. Perhaps we could put the occupant in charge of the personnel department I plan to establish for the museum.)

On the other hand, Dr. Simone may be with us for some time. We have not found it easy to “place” the animals. Some of them have been sold or donated to other institutions. You can’t give the creatures away to private citizens because, frankly, they don’t make good pets. You don’t see sensitive-looking people leading them around the streets the way they do with slow greyhounds.

Some of the animals have been habituated back into the wild on an island off the coast of Africa. As an aside, there are times when I think it would be handy if certain humans could be habituated back into some wilderness more suitable to their feral natures. I am thinking about people like Malachy Morin, who might benefit from living in a real state of nature. Though, to give credit where credit is due, he has settled down somewhat since his marriage to Amanda Feeney, the Bugle reporter.

The fact remains Mr. Morin does not know how to do anything