Smoking monkeys

Sighted in a Saudia Arabian zoo 3

I interrupt my reporting from Iowa to pass on this curio I found on the blog of my old friend Angelo Young, who works in Saudi Arabia and writes bemused, funny missives from the global crude-oil capital.

In this one, he reports a strange sight in a Jeddah zoo:

"This Lebanese guy handed the monkey a fag and a bottle of water," said a guy I know who recently took his daughter and wife to the zoo. "It knew enough not to grab the lit end, and started smoking it by inhaling," he says as he begins to laugh, "the cigarette on one side of its mouth and blowing the smoke out of the other side like he was in a bloody movie. Other monkeys came over and the guy handed them out."

Ain't that the damnedest thing?

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. amc89 Posted 1:18 am
    27 Jul 2007

    Sounds pretty cruel to meZoos that can't ensure that visitors don't interact in a harmful way with animals should be shut down.  A few months ago British singer Peter Doherty was caught giving a joint to a penguin at a zoo in England. A biologist later said it could have killed the animal. So it's not very amusing to me when I hear about stunts like this.

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  2. PermieWriter's avatar

    PermieWriter Posted 1:55 am
    27 Jul 2007

    Poor monkeyHe didn't drink the water, did he? We all know that leads to instant death.

    Eat what you grow, grow what you eat

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  3. Dispatcher Posted 11:26 pm
    29 Jul 2007

    Smoking MonkeysOh, relax. Smoking is bad for you (and monkeys) but zoos are prisons for animals, so feeling bad about this not about the elephant chained to a wall in your humane neighborhood zoo is dumb. It's sad and often the only thing one can do is laugh at the insanity. Who says being self-righteously indignant over stuff like this is the proper liberal response? If you want to see true awfulness, I could send you pics of the cheetah mother that had its legs purposefully broken (so it can't flee as easily) and smuggled into Saudi Arabia to decorate some low-life rich-sheikh cocksucker's Arabian estate (a sheikh who can afford this evil sense of entitlement estate because YOU -- the royal "you" -- as an American have a sense of entitlement too much natural resources and bankroll Saudi Arabia, along with China). The cheetah, along with six cubs had to be put to sleep after authorities (to their credit) confiscated them from smugglers who went to jail -- they were already too emaciated to be rehabilitated. I laugh at this, too.

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