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Alien abductions.
Apr. 11th, 2007 01:41 pmPicture this. You are a prisoner of an alien race. You were taken away from your family when you were quite young, so for most of your life you have known only captivity. The aliens are obviously technologically superior to you. They have devices you can't understand, and weapons that seem awesomely powerful. They seem at least somewhat more intelligent than you are as well, you don't understand all of the things they do. You can understand only a little of their language, and their vocal apparatus is unsuited to speaking yours, so you do not communicate directly with them. You know very little about them, in fact, despite having been raised by them from a young age. They are tall and spindly, physically much weaker than you. Pound for pound your muscles are perhaps as much as three times stronger than theirs, in fact, so though some of them outweigh you, none of them are as physically strong as you.
They keep you in a cage. It is a very comfortable cage, all your physical needs are met. You sleep well, eat healthy and tasty food, and generally live quite comfortably. But you're still in a cage. Although you barely remember life outside the cage, you can see that the aliens do not live in cages. They come and go from your cage as they please. They are free, and you are not. It's a good enough life, really, and most of the time you're happy with it, but underneath it all there's the dim memory of your family, of living free, and there's always a certain discontent underlying every moment of pleasure.
They want you to do things, to perform tasks. They are, in fact, studying you. Though you, taken from your family young and given no education of any sort, may not realize this fact. All you know is that they have you do things which you find strange, but they reward you when you do them. They are individuals, with personalities that you get to know. Some of them even seem to like you, and care for you. You like them too. They're nice, though strange. But still, they can leave your cage when they are finished, you must stay in it.
Then one day one of the aliens doesn't properly close your cage door, and you realize that you can get it open again. You do so, and step outside to freedom. But outside is an alien world. The plants, and animals, the very air is different than the childhood home you dimly recall. And you have no idea where that home is, or how to get there. Also, you know that the aliens, with their weapons, will soon discover you are gone. They will come after you and either capture you or kill you. And even if you do escape, you will be living alone, in a alien world, with none of your kind around you. You hesitate. You have nowhere to go, no plan, no means of escape. Your freedom is suddenly hollow.
And then you see one of them. Tall and spindly, weak and unarmed, for most of them do not habitualy carry their devastating weaponry. It is not one of the ones you have come to like, it is merely one of them, alien and strange. One of the beings that took you from your family. You could kill it easily, it's so frail, and there are no others near enough to stop you.
What would you do? Think about that for a bit.
And while you're thinking, let me add one crucial bit of information to this little scenario. You are a chimpanzee, your captors are human beings.
I thought of this while watching a show yesterday about "rogue" chimps that have attacked humans. This very scenario took place, a male chimp having gotten loose, saw a lone human, and the chimp chose to viciously attack it. Witnesses spoke of the "rage" of the chimp. The chimp's caretaker arrived on the scene, was unable to pull the enraged chimp off (yes, they really are three times stronger than us by weight) and was forced to call somebody to shoot it. She was crying as she told the story, and kept saying how this raging beast wasn't the chimp she knew, that he was affectionate and gentle, and she just didn't understand why he would do such a thing.
She forgot, I think, that in being very much like humans, chimps get our vices along with our virtues.
And though she sees herself as caring for the chimps, giving them a better life than they might otherwise have, and furthering the cause of science, she doesn't seem to realize, perhaps because she doesn't want to, that chimps are smart enough to have concepts like "freedom," and "captivity," and just like humans most of them prefer the former to the latter.
I'm not saying this in some sort of PETA-esque campaign to free the poor captive chimps; research on them is invaluable, and like many captive animals, there are all kinds of problems with trying to release them into the wild. Finding places for them to live where other chimps won't run them off, where humans don't already live, and where the resources they need can be found, for one. Teaching them how to survive without regular meals delivered to them, for another. And the loss of knowledge that would come from the freeing of chimps would be staggering.
But seeing that lady crying, totally unable to understand how a being that could be kind to her could try to kill another human just made me think. Lady, if you were that chimp, what would you do?
They keep you in a cage. It is a very comfortable cage, all your physical needs are met. You sleep well, eat healthy and tasty food, and generally live quite comfortably. But you're still in a cage. Although you barely remember life outside the cage, you can see that the aliens do not live in cages. They come and go from your cage as they please. They are free, and you are not. It's a good enough life, really, and most of the time you're happy with it, but underneath it all there's the dim memory of your family, of living free, and there's always a certain discontent underlying every moment of pleasure.
They want you to do things, to perform tasks. They are, in fact, studying you. Though you, taken from your family young and given no education of any sort, may not realize this fact. All you know is that they have you do things which you find strange, but they reward you when you do them. They are individuals, with personalities that you get to know. Some of them even seem to like you, and care for you. You like them too. They're nice, though strange. But still, they can leave your cage when they are finished, you must stay in it.
Then one day one of the aliens doesn't properly close your cage door, and you realize that you can get it open again. You do so, and step outside to freedom. But outside is an alien world. The plants, and animals, the very air is different than the childhood home you dimly recall. And you have no idea where that home is, or how to get there. Also, you know that the aliens, with their weapons, will soon discover you are gone. They will come after you and either capture you or kill you. And even if you do escape, you will be living alone, in a alien world, with none of your kind around you. You hesitate. You have nowhere to go, no plan, no means of escape. Your freedom is suddenly hollow.
And then you see one of them. Tall and spindly, weak and unarmed, for most of them do not habitualy carry their devastating weaponry. It is not one of the ones you have come to like, it is merely one of them, alien and strange. One of the beings that took you from your family. You could kill it easily, it's so frail, and there are no others near enough to stop you.
What would you do? Think about that for a bit.
And while you're thinking, let me add one crucial bit of information to this little scenario. You are a chimpanzee, your captors are human beings.
I thought of this while watching a show yesterday about "rogue" chimps that have attacked humans. This very scenario took place, a male chimp having gotten loose, saw a lone human, and the chimp chose to viciously attack it. Witnesses spoke of the "rage" of the chimp. The chimp's caretaker arrived on the scene, was unable to pull the enraged chimp off (yes, they really are three times stronger than us by weight) and was forced to call somebody to shoot it. She was crying as she told the story, and kept saying how this raging beast wasn't the chimp she knew, that he was affectionate and gentle, and she just didn't understand why he would do such a thing.
She forgot, I think, that in being very much like humans, chimps get our vices along with our virtues.
And though she sees herself as caring for the chimps, giving them a better life than they might otherwise have, and furthering the cause of science, she doesn't seem to realize, perhaps because she doesn't want to, that chimps are smart enough to have concepts like "freedom," and "captivity," and just like humans most of them prefer the former to the latter.
I'm not saying this in some sort of PETA-esque campaign to free the poor captive chimps; research on them is invaluable, and like many captive animals, there are all kinds of problems with trying to release them into the wild. Finding places for them to live where other chimps won't run them off, where humans don't already live, and where the resources they need can be found, for one. Teaching them how to survive without regular meals delivered to them, for another. And the loss of knowledge that would come from the freeing of chimps would be staggering.
But seeing that lady crying, totally unable to understand how a being that could be kind to her could try to kill another human just made me think. Lady, if you were that chimp, what would you do?
