I know very little about the
Chinese Zodiac sign but this I know – I was born on the Year of the Dog and
2016 is the Year of the Monkey. (They happen to be my two favorite
animals). I was at a local Chinese
grocery store early this year on the eve of Super Bowl 2016, which also
happened to precede the Chinese New Year.
I just had two packets of frozen banana leaves and a couple of cans of
coconut milk for a cassava dessert I was going to make for the Super Bowl party
we were hosting at home. The “10 items
or fewer” checkout was lined with people snaking all the way from the produce
section. I am recalling this episode now because we’re halfway through 2016 and
I am somewhat alarmed at what is going on around the world.
Striking up a conversation while
waiting, I asked the guy in front of me, who was Chinese, about the coming
Chinese New Year. As is known, the
Chinese Zodiac sign has a year’s worth of portent as opposed to the daily or
monthly presages of the western horoscopy.
While I am not one to subscribe to the predestined path that is
determined by an animal attached to each year of the 12-year cycle, I asked him
what he thought the New Year had in store. He told me that the Year of the
Monkey is often a harbinger of bad omen.
Another Chinese at the 24-Hour Fitness that I happened to chat with a
few days later also said the same thing.
According to her, what came to mind was the recent earthquake that
devastated Taiwan, where she’s from, and the economic travails that ail China
today etc. “What does that say about the
upcoming U.S. election?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulder and that was about
the extent of her response. How about the zika virus outbreak in South America
and the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro?
Then, we hear the drop in oil prices that most thought was a good thing
is partly to blame for much of the trouble in the global economy. So, what is going on?
Buried in the middle section of
newspapers and as an aside in a radio broadcast I noticed stories that animal
rights activists have taken up recently as their current cause celeb. It is about
macaque monkeys employed as forced labor in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia as
coconut gatherers. I read that chances
are 95% of the coconut milk at any
grocery store comes from coconuts gathered by these hapless primates that more
than having opposable thumbs like we have, they can do with their feet what we
can’t with ours – they have opposable toes equally adept at grabbing things. It got my attention because I am a regular
buyer of coconut milk. A quick search
produced a good number of YouTube videos showing exactly how the monkeys are
trained to do their human masters’ bidding of gathering coconuts. Below are the
links to those videos:
The videos
are meant to be both informative and amusing (although perhaps not to the
animal rights folks) and one cannot help but be awed by how well the monkeys do
the job. In some places tourists pay
good money to watch them in action. There are all kinds of statistics on their
productivity as I came to find out but what is certain is that the monkeys are
far more proficient by as much as ten to one better than the human gatherer for
the same amount of time working the coconut groves. Then there is the fact that the monkeys do
not need very much by way of compensation; they are not known to complain or
threaten to form a union; their housing accommodations are very minimal, to say
the least; and they certainly cannot sue or file for grievance. I read too that monkeys engaged as coconut
gatherers live much longer than their counterparts in the wild. It too is true though that only young
macaques that exhibit traits of promise go on to become professional gatherers,
so to speak, while less talented ones are sold as pets.
But there is a dark side, according to animal rights activists.
Much had
already been said of the inhumane treatment of monkeys at medical and
scientific laboratory test facilities.
The pharmaceutical industry is a constant target of activists. Using them for forced labor might seem ethically
benign and certainly a lot less stressful to the collective conscience of the
general public but the activists feel very strongly against the whole idea of
forcing an animal that has 98% of our DNA to work against its will. The activists complain too about elephant
labor and how some beasts of burden are treated: water buffalo tilling
farmlands in Asia; pack animals like Mongolian yaks and reindeer, etc. I have not heard much complaint about eagles
that are trained by Mongolians to hunt prey animals and what about falconry?
They all fall within the exploitation of animals for the benefit of
humans. As a side note, let me mention
that the domestication of the horse is credited with advances in agriculture
and transportation and more importantly the rapid exploration of the open lands
and spread of civilization in pre-mechanized era. But I digressed.
The year of
the monkey, is a harbinger of bad things? The ancient Greeks used to describe the basic
elements as Earth, Water, Air and Fire.
A Chicago rock band named itself, “Earth, Wind and Fire”, and they
indeed played in a Greek theater sometime in 2004. I really don’t know where I was going with
that one but I thought I’d mention it, if only to say that whoever of the band
members who came up with the name knew his ancient Greek history. I digressed again.
I learned
that the Chinese version of the basic elements include Metal, which makes
it one more than what the Greeks had. Their five are Metal, Water, Wind, Fire
and Earth. What then does the Year of
the Monkey bring to world events?
“According to Chinese Five Elements Horoscopes,
Monkey contains Metal and Water. Metal is connected to gold. Water is connected
to wisdom and danger. Therefore, we will deal with more financial events in the
year of the Monkey. Monkey is a smart, naughty, wily and vigilant animal. If
you want to have good return for your money investment, then you need to
outsmart the Monkey. Metal is also connected to the Wind. That implies the
status of events will be changing very quickly. Think twice before you leap
when making changes for your finance, career, business relationship and people
relationship.”
So, based on
my limited conversation on the subject which I mentioned earlier with the
couple of folks who seemed to know, the referendum result in England to leave
the EU adds to the ominous portent that can befall the world. Should we worry?
Let’s see,
the last time it was the Year of the Monkey was 2004. I already mentioned that the rock band,
Earth, Wind & Fire, played in Greece that year. Bill Clinton had a heart bypass surgery and
it was a success. A 97 year old woman
was found alive in the aftermath of an earthquake in Iran and five days later a
man was also found alive from the same quake.
Those were the good news. But there were a number of disasters, not the
least of which was the earthquake in Indonesia that produced one of the worst
tsunamis the world had witnessed in modern history. It devastated long coastlines around the
area, including the beach resort area in Thailand. The total death toll from the affected areas
around the Indian Ocean exceeded 200,000!
That happened right at the last days of the year.
244 pilgrims
died from the Hajj stampede in Saudi Arabia, an earthquake in Morocco killed
300 people, over 1,000 people died when hurricane Jeanne hit Haiti, there were
plane crashes and supermarket fires, etc.
2004 had its share of disasters.
We should really worry about this Year of the Monkey, shouldn’t we?
However, we
should keep in mind though that WWI, WWII and the 1929 Stock Market Crash that
brought the Great Depression did not begin or occur in the years of the Monkey. In fact, we can say that each year of the
modern world has had its share of catastrophic events – natural and man-caused.
Let me
digress for a bit again. What I would like
to know is what year was it when the Mount Everest-size asteroid slammed into
what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico sixty seven million
years ago. Oh, but wait, there was no
calendar then yet, no Chinese calendar, for certain. But, can we
extrapolate? No, that’s too much work,
of course. It was a really bad year for the dinosaurs. It had to have been the
most devastating experience in climate change the world had ever seen, through
the eyes of the then dominant species on earth. Their extinction began soon
after that, after over 160 million years of raw dominion over all living things. But it was great news for the tiny mammals
which up to that point in time occupied a very insignificant niche in a
landscape dominated by giant creatures. Those mammals subsisted mainly on
insects or vegetation on forest floors and crevices and it was likely that
their activities were limited at nightfall. Fast forward to many millions of
years later and here we are – the most able descendants of those mammals that
were no bigger than today’s squirrels. Smaller
dinosaurs did survive and we still see them today as lizards, iguanas and
alligators but others even had loftier ambitions, not content with just
climbing the evolutionary ladder, they flew off the ground: today’s birds!
The Yucatan
asteroid impact may have put an end to the rule of the mighty dinosaurs but you
will not be reading about this had the evolutionary road remained unchanged. From
those early mammal ancestors arose the general branch of species called
primates – lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys,
apes and us, humans. Let us be clear about this. We, humans, did not come from monkeys or
apes. Consider primates as a big branch that split into prosimians (where
lemurs belong) and simians; the latter is split into apes, monkeys and hominids
(where modern humans developed from).
While primates are generally defined to have relatively larger brains
(brain size relative to body weight) than all other mammals, humans dominate
that category. That is why, except for
Antarctica, humans inhabit all corners of the world while the other primates
are mostly concentrated in tropical environments.
Where am I
going with this? We share 50% of our DNA
with a banana but 98 % of our DNA is shared with monkeys and apes (which, by
the way, include gorillas and orangutans).
Animal testing and research are what they are. Inhumane, we are told by animal rights
groups, but should it be less inhumane if we applied the tests directly into
human subjects from the get go? In the
last five years alone 10 Nobel Prizes for medicine were awarded to researchers
and scientists whose contribution to medicine were formulated from laboratory testing on
animals that ranged from mice, frogs, rabbits, dogs and cattle and yes, monkeys. In the past, small pox vaccines were developed using cows,
but polio and rubella vaccines, and most notably advances in AIDS medication,
just to name a few, came from research and experiments using monkeys. By the way, advances in
veterinary medicine were developed out of research and experiments using
animals. A couple of days ago Perdue, a
huge producer of poultry meat, announced that it is reforming its animal
welfare policies. Animal rights
activists were largely responsible for this and many other improvements in the
treatment of animals.
Among other traits that separate humans from animals are our capacity for compassion and it is because of that unique characteristic that voices from animal rights groups and animal ethicists are being heard. This has brought about humane treatment of animals in laboratories and food production (meat and poultry), farming, hunting and entertainment. The death of a zoo gorilla had, in fact, gotten more sustained coverage than dozens of human deaths that occur every day on the streets of Chicago, Detroit, Sao Paolo or Fallujah.
After what
had gone on during the first half, should we be worrying too much about the
remaining half of the year? Even as I
declare that I am not putting too much stock on the symbolic significance of the
animal-related-12 year-cycle of Sheng Xiao, here I am with a discombobulated
musing on the Year of the Monkey.
All we can hope for is that the world’s leaders, soon to be chosen ones
here and everywhere else, pick cleverness and smarts of the Monkey and not the mischief and bad
portents it is associated with. Didn’t I
just say I don’t put much stock into it?
Oh, well, I am hedging my bets.
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