Trees... And Monkeys

Trees. The way they are planted in this highly mountainous region is in rows. Primarily cedars, the ones that are not like the others stand out even more. Oh yes, it's beautiful and bizarre, somewhat sterile in a weird way. The "wilderness" of Japan around me is very different than the wilderness I know back home.

Monkeys. The other day, last Saturday, after hiking with a local elementary school near the churning active volcano of Aso my mother and I were taken to a place where Japanese monkeys are kept in cages. Then there were two that they had trained to do tricks like walk on really tall stilts and do jumps and summersaults and... all the while they had these weird collars on them and the trainers would hold a string attached to them and pull them hard when the monkeys were misbehaving.

The whole thing reminded me of my thesis on Kafka and evolution that focused on one story Kafka wrote called "A Report to An Academy" in which a monkey tells his story of becoming civilized. During the monkey show I asked myself who is more intelligent, the monkey or the trainer? Perhaps they are equal, I thought, because they both do things primarily to stay alive or because of the various other pressures that surround them. It all depends on how you are measuring intelligence I guess. My mother and I, and some of the other viewers, were pretty uncomfortable during the show. It was hard to watch such intelligent creatures be pushed around like that and in such a slave-like way. It is more disturbing, I think, than slaughtering animals in a farm, I think, because it's main purpose is entertainment and not food (and these monkeys require that much more controlling because they are that much more capable of making their own decisions than, say, most other trained animals). So I guess that I disagree with the whole business.