You Are Not a Girl and You Go Away

Back in sixth grade I wrote what was probably my first research paper. I remember it hardly feeling like school work at all. Partly this was due to my teacher, Mrs. Sjolund, who was very supportive and encouraging, and partly I was simply fascinated by the subject. The paper was about the social structure of baboons. Being eleven, and in Iowa, didn't afford a whole lot of field research - none, actually. The closest I ever got to where baboons live was years later, in the Dzanga-Sangha reserve in the Central African Republic. It wasn't the savannah habitat of the baboons I had studied, but a lush jungle rainforest, with elephants and monkeys as just the tip of an incredibly varied and dense profusion of life. Anyhow, that's a whole other story. What made me think of all this was a recent trip (7.22) to the zoo. And the realization that primate field research is never far from home...

"During play, a young primate is getting to know other primates and discovering his or her place in the social hierarchy of the group."

this was followed by a parentally encouraged attempt at reconciliation...


Sometime after my baboon paper my parents gave me a book about Jane Goodall. There's a lot of good people working to secure the habitats and lives of primates increasingly threatened by us, their co-primates - humans that is, whose social structure is such that we must wage war against ourselves for the greater good of the animal kingdom...

Bushmeat Project is a fairly comprehensive list of groups who are attempting to give voice and rights to species who live outside of our language and legislative loop.