Japanese monkeys

From BBC news:

A Japanese zoo has apologised after naming a baby monkey Charlotte in honour of the newborn British princess, it's reported.

The Takasakiyama Zoo, in southern Japan, was inundated with complaints after announcing the female macaque monkey's name on Wednesday, the Kyodo news agency reports. The zoo says the name was chosen after a public vote, a tradition for their first newborn macaque
monkey each year. Charlotte received the most votes, although it wasn't exactly a runaway winner, with 59 out of 853 people choosing it.
But other members of the public felt that it was disrespectful to the British royal family to name a monkey after a princess. The zoo faced a "barrage" of complaints from people wanting them to re-name the macaque, with some noting that the Japanese people might not be best pleased if a British monkey were named after one of their own royal family, Kyodo reports. The zoo has apologised in a statement on its website. It says it takes people's concerns seriously and is discussing a potential name change for the newborn animal.

Well, I just came back from Japan,  and did have encounters with some Japanese monkeys out in the wild, in Kamikochi. I didn't know that one of their relatives would be named in honour of a British princess and neither that this would be considered scandalous. The question is why? Why should a princess' name not be useable by a monkey? Is a princess better than a monkey? On what grounds? Just because she happened to be born in a so-to-speak royal family? This is one of the irrationalities/absurdities of humans, a mere remnant of eras when people thought of royals as representatives of their gods. In any case, I find the monkeys more attractive than the princess. To wit, take a look:

Chimp feeds tiger

Here is another example of how primates can be trained to follow a  human-like behaviour. I just watched a BBC video showing a young chimpanzee, Dodo, feed a tiger cub from a bottle of milk. He has been doing so for a year. I always find animal behaviour fascinating (not least because it can make us aware of ourselves).

Mongoose traditions

 behaviourr

Banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) have been observed to show certain social traditions. Each pup pairs up with an older (escort) mongoose and learn how to imitate them. Two scientists placed an artificial food item (rice and fish contained in a plastic egg) and watched what the escorts did to open the eggs: they held them with their paws and bit into them. Pups observed their escorts and, months later, had learned the technique and could imitate it. Some other escorts did something completely different: they threw the eggs on a hard surface. Well, their pups also learned this technique from their escorts.
-- Nature 465, 668 (10 June 2010)

Friendship

This is a wonderful video, it's about friendship. Between members of the order Primates, in fact between members of the family Hominidae, more specifically between members of the subfamily Homininae.



How little is the difference between its members!