Seattle to Mozambique

12 October 2006

So I’ve decided to write to y’all about the monkey and the chicken. For those of you who are offended easily it would be best to stop reading now. For the rest of you…well…most of you…here is the tale of interspecies love.

I’ve already mentioned that I spent the weekend with HIV counselors at a retreat. The place of the retreat was a resort in the middle of nowhere but a good crossroads from all of central Mozambique. The resort had a restaurant and hotel like rooms that surrounded the center of the resort with a pool (that no one used) and cages that held: baboons (mother, father, child), turkeys, guinea hens, ducks, little monkeys, and pigeons (ok—maybe doves but they looked like pigeons). It was actually kind of a sad little scene. I must say…a baboons butt is definitely more disturbing up close than it is in a zoo or on TV…much much more disturbing. But I’m off track. There was one little adolescent male baboon that for some reason was not caged. I don’t know if he originally was caged and was rejected by the other baboons or if he had come in from the bush. (Sidenote: I’ve seen a number of baboons on the side of the road and running about…I find it kind of creepy given that they seem so human-like, or maybe we just seem so baboon like). The little baboon was a terror and would run after people, climb all over the cages, and generally riot around. We all gave the little baboon a wide berth.

At one point all the counselors broke up into groups to discuss difficult cases. I accompanied one group of counselors outside and we began to debate the cases. We were soon distracting by the little baboon who seemed to be mauling a chicken. Yeah…it wasn’t mauling. The baboon, hopped up on adolescent hormones, was trying to form an interspecies bond with the chicken. The problem was that the chicken was little and the baboon big and all the grabbing was not healthy for the little chicken. We tried to chase the baboon away but it just kept coming back. At this point however, for those of you who are horrified at the cruelty to this poor chicken, the chicken had plenty of opportunity to escape. It didn’t. It would run away when the baboon got really aggressive but then it would sit down and let the baboon approach it again. Still, it was not going to be able to take all of that lovin’. We finally called some people who worked at the resort and they took the chicken away. Those who got close to the scenes of love related that actual interspecies penetration took place. YUCK!!! To top it all off the little baboon, pissed that his chicken-lover was rudely wrenched from his grasp, ran over to our group, sat down beside us, spread his legs wide open and began to piss in our general direction.