Wednesday, June 29, 2016

The Year of the Monkey


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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