Monkey Monday, Beautiful Binti Jua

"Who me?"
Yes you, you are beautiful! :)

Naptime
Originally uploaded by Rigib.

You may have seen this in 1996, I never did (where was i?) :) I don't care that it happened in the past, an article just yesterday brought this up and I had to share it. Have a wonderful Monkey Monday.
Barbara J. King: Great apes aren't the brutes you expect

A toddler falls over a railing, 24 feet down, into the gorilla enclosure of the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago. There he lies, unconscious, among seven apes, some with poundage and power exceeding that of an adult man. As one of them approaches the boy, onlookers tense.
But Binti Jua, an 8-year-old female gorilla, picks up the boy and, carrying him along with her own infant, gently hands him over to zoo staff.

This stunning event in 1996 earned Binti Jua global headlines (and can be seen, if in grainy video, on YouTube). It was an incident that no one who witnessed it – in person or online – could forget. But there was nothing about Binti Jua, or any of the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas or orangutans that exhibit reasoning and empathy, in freelance writer Russell Paul La Valle's op-ed column in the Washington Post, "Why they're human rights."

It's clear that La Valle hasn't spent much time with apes lately – or looking into any of the major findings by primate scientists over the past two or three decades. In expressing reasoning and empathy, Binti Jua was not unique; nor was her behavior an artifact of zoo life. Wild chimpanzees plan ahead and carry tools to work sites, where they crack open hard-shelled nuts with wood and stone hammers. They choose sides thoughtfully in ongoing competitions for status and reward friends' loyalties while exacting revenge on their enemies. When close companions suffer wounds or injuries, wild chimpanzees groom and care for them.
Read the whole article here Check out the Great Ape Project



(There is background noise, talking at the end, turn the sound off if you like)
"Binti Jua, is a female Western lowland gorilla. On August 16, 1996, a young boy fell into the gorilla exhibit of Tropic World, and Binti Jua carefully cradled the boy and brought him to her trainers. The incident received international attention, inspiring a lively debate as to whether Binti Jua's actions were the result of the training she received from her keepers (who had taught her to bring her own baby, Koola, to zoo curators for inspection) or some instinctive sense of animal altruism."