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It’s astounding, humbling, and thought-provoking to observe monkeys in action. While watching a Jane Goodall documentary that particularly resonated with me, I was transfixed by the similarities between chimp and human behavior. There were teenaged girls cooing over babies, tiny boys posturing like big apes, and even a chilling incident where one chimp who had stayed inordinately attached to his mother dispatched a newly-arrived sibling in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. So, if monkeys are so much like us, I guess we just lucked out in evolutionary roulette, huh? Charlton Heston’s damn, dirty ape experience notwithstanding, they got the cages and we got the keys. When I was five, my family went to the zoo where we spent time at the monkey habitat. It was very busy and the animals were subjected to waves of gawkers, but seemed utterly unfazed, until one monkey chose me out of the crowd. To my delight and the amusement of the quickly growing swarm of spectators, the chimp would mirror my every move. We danced in tandem for quite awhile, until the bystanders got restless. As I turned to leave, the chimp and I locked eyes and I felt an unbearable sadness that I could walk freely away and he never could. In Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps For Sale, the naughty monkeys are tricked into giving up their prizes but not their freedom. Esphyr escaped Russia with her family as a girl--perhaps she knows something of being held captive.
http://www.amazon.com/Caps-Sale-Peddler-Monkeys-Business/dp/0064431436

http://www.slobodkina.com/about%20esphyr.htm

In my first year of college at Cal State Los Angeles, some kitchen mishap made our dorm apartment reek. As we opened the windows to get rid of the stench, I sputtered something about the smell being worse than a skunk. One of my roommates, a born and bred Angeleno, gasped back that she wouldn’t know because she had never smelled a skunk. Even having been metropolitan-born myself, I could not believe such a thing. Never smelled a skunk? Ever? To what do you compare all bad smells (other than Long Beach)? And then it got more bizarre: she’d never seen a cow either. My mind still reels all these years later. This young woman had reached pre-med student adulthood but had never been to a petting zoo, for heaven’s sake? How is this possible? My kids have been very fortunate that they have always had a local working farm and pumpkin patch to visit where they experience the animals, from newborn to retired, up close and personal. The farm shut down as a public entity this year, but I have twenty years worth of petting, feeding, and hay riding pictures as proof that I at least tried to broaden their suburban horizons. Annie North Bedford’s The Jolly Barnyard shows an idyllic picture of farm animals brainstorming what contributions they can make to the farmer’s birthday celebration. Maybe there’s some rich Southern California doctor that would pay for them to take their show on the road to the inner city.

http://www.amazon.com/Jolly-Barnyard-Little-Golden-Book/dp/0375828427

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/585620.Annie_North_Bedford