It's all about the bonobos, baby!

As the grizzled matriarch of the Chimpanzee Refuge, it behooves me to call attention to tonight's Nova: The Last Great Ape. Our close cousins, Pan paniscus, the bonobos, are featured.

The PBS site's interview with Frans de Waal is worth checking out, and if you have yet to read his book, Our Inner Ape, de Waal's responses are a nice prelude to his expanded posit that we Homo sapiens, possess a little chimpanzee and bonobo within us.

I'll also take this opportunity to mention that today is my birthday, so I eagerly await my grooming session, and hope to see a lively bout of penis fencing performed in my honor.

More like this

As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the third of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker. In my earlier pieces "Bonobo (…
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the first of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker. As expected, the apologists for…
Reprinted from Wildlife Conservation Magazine "Behind Enemy Lines" November/December 2005 By Eric Michael Johnson           December 2002 -- After four days traveling upriver in a dugout canoe, Belgian primatologist Jef Dupain became the first researcher in five years to return to the war-torn…
I have always enjoyed reading the work of Frans de Waal, a primatologist who focuses on the social structure and psychology of apes, particularly the two chimp species, and monkeys. His previous books, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, The Ape and the Sushi…

The last time I tried to publicly engage in penis fencing I ended up with a restraining order. Apparently such behavior is no longer smiled upon at the YMCA. It would seem I need to update my '70s disco collection.

Nonetheless, please accept my offer of grooming.

Happy birthday.

W & lly, thanks!

I think I feel a birthday nit crawling right over here--->

Happy Birthday -- hope it was great!

From one "Joan" to another, thanks! Today turned out to be the true birthday present in the form of an ice storm which allowed me to vegetate at home.