Two Penn’orth: Bursting the bubble

Amidst the recent news that student fees are expected to rise and that the age at which you are allowed to die has risen, you may not have noticed that a chimp by the name of Charlie quietly passed away at his home in a South African Zoo.

This may not seem like particularly big news to you or me and in reality it probably isn’t. However, one small feature of Mr. Chimp’s past does make for quite interesting reading.
You see, after picking up a smoking habit because of cigarettes being thrown into his enclosure, Charlie began to bum smokes from zoo visitors by gesturing to his mouth with two fingers, mimicking the actions of smokers he’d watched.

Visitors continued to indulge the chimp, which inevitably brought on a hailstorm of accusations from animal rights activists when videos surfaced online not long after, prompting Bloemfontein zoo officials to try to cut Charlie’s nicotine supply off entirely. The zoo claims that the chimp’s addiction played no part in his death.

Now, I’m not one of these mouth-breathing fools who believe we should be allowed to wreak havoc amongst the animal kingdom; but genuinely, this surely marks a dramatic leap upwards on the evolutionary ladder. Forget walking and talking, the ability to roll would overcome all these obstacles. And you cannot, for instance, claim that Charlie shouldn’t have been allowed to smoke on the grounds of intellectual deficiency because, by that virtue, many humans regularly prove themselves well short of the requirements.

So if Bubbles and other animals want to reach out to the international – and now interspecies – hand of friendship and help themselves to fistfuls of Marlboros, that’s fine by me. It seems almost churlish to deny a creature with which we share 95 percent of our DNA the same privileges we enjoy.

What’s more, if any were to become ill as a result it would provide a genuine opportunity for scientists to test out potentially life-saving medicines without fear. And the best part of all this? It would all be in the name of animal rights.