Bonobo Chimpanzee - 1st person essay
Uploaded by mitchklauser on Mar 25, 2001
A Day in the Life of a Bonobo ChimpBefore I show you the first page in my daily journal I must first give you some insight about my kind, the pygmy chimps, or bonobos, as I prefer to be called. I prefer to be called a bonobo rather than a pygmy chimp, because my kind are not chimpanzees, we are practically humans, 99.6% genetically the same to be exact. So please do not refer to me as a pygmy chimp. Were as far from chimps, as chimps are from gorillas. Here is the lowdown on my fellow bonobos and I. Males and females look just about the same, except for the obvious, which will be talked about much more later in my story. My kind has black hair covering their entire body, excluding face, hands, and feet. Children have a white spot on their tail stub, while elders’ hair gets gray with age (another one of those human characteristics). Though we do share the same long arm, short leg characteristic as our inferior relatives, the chimps, we have a more slender body structure than them. We are much smaller than regular chimpanzees, where the ignorant name pygmy chimp comes from, about 2 ½ to 3 feet tall, but weigh between 65 and 90 pounds, males weighing more. In a daily meal depending on the season we eat everything from fresh fruit and honey to termites, worms, and even small reptiles and squirrels. When the season gets hot and dry we must eat the stems and roots of plants.
From the humans I have talked to I have learned that my kind is endangered, or for all of the idiotic chimpanzees, there aren’t very many of us left. One woman has told me that we are endangered because of our high expectations of living standards. We wouldn’t think of living anywhere besides the secondary tropical lowland rainforests in Zaire. She told me another reason that my kind was endangered was because of something called, “poaching.” I had no clue what that meant, but after she explained it I was shocked to find that animals other than leopards hunted us. Finally before this female human left I asked her why she wasn’t afraid of me and my kind, and she told me that we seemed much more relaxed than any other animal she has ever seen. I though about this for only...