Monkeys Talk – We Should Listen

Monkeys talk less and say more, something a human society with thousands of cable TV channels and the Internet ought to consider.

A report in the New York Times comments on a language used by monkeys in the Ivory Coast, but contains no comments from those monkeys on the language humans use in the United States. (Typical one-sided reporting job from Mainstream Media.)

Still, the Times says Campbell’s monkey is reported to say “Krak! Krak!” which announces a leopard looking for a once-only lunch partner.  We might say “There’s a possibility of a feline predator, possibly a leopard, although whether or not it is hunting has yet to be determined.”

And the hunting leopard might say “the Windbag Special looks good.”

Campbell’s monkeys have a vocabulary of only a few words, but they can have different meanings depending upon how they are put together. As the article explains, the words seem pretty much clear and to the point, aimed at survival in the bush.

Humans, on the other hand, have a vocabulary of thousands of words and seldom are clear and to the point. Our words are not aimed at survival in the bush as much as beating around it.

A monkey would call another monkey who enjoys beating on weaker monkeys a bully. I do not know how that is rendered in the actual Monkeyspeak, but I’m willing to bet it has nothing to do with “recurrent aggression management issues.”

A monkey confronted by another monkey who smells bad says “You stink!” There is probably no monkey equivalent of “social scent selection issues.”

Monkeys who steal are branded as thieves and punished if caught. There are no monkey words for “property ownership identification disorder” or “behavior modification enabling.”

Monkeys who do not wish to speak, don’t. Humans who do not wish to speak call press conferences to announce that they have nothing to say.

Monkeys have sex as they please and don’t talk about it much. Humans talk about having sex as they please, occasionally have it, and talk about it still more – especially if it’s about sex someone else had.

The Times article said more scientific experiments would be done to see if humans had correctly decoded the monkey messaging system. The monkeys were not said to have any interest in decoding the human messaging system.

Is it any wonder?

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