But Now You Know

Monkeys Don’t Kill People; Xanax Does

Which is more responsible for the isolated incident of a lady being mauled by a chimp...this pigmy marmoset, or the drug the 200 lb ape was taking, that is known to cause violent aggression?

You’ve probably heard, in tedious detail, about the chimp, Travis, who ripped the face off some old lady.

What’s creepy about this story, more than it sounding like people are keeping pets that can kill them (as can horses and dogs), is the way power-hungry politicians are exploiting it, contextually lying, in order to pass unconstitutional laws we’d otherwise never tolerate.

The facts of the story are that a 200 lb chimp, who’d been raised as if a child by some woman who strikes me as emotionally akin to a “cat lady“, was secretly given the drug Xanax in his tea. Yes, she fed him tea. A few minutes later, he freaked out and bolted outside. When the lady’s friend, who apparently had a new hairstyle rendering her a “stranger”, showed up to help, Travis attacked her.

You may have noticed a detail that’s not normally mentioned, above. Travis was given a mood-altering drug, of which he was unaware.  Xanax is a drug that is used to control people’s minds, but it has a well-documented “paradoxical” side effect of sometimes causing people to fly into insane rages, becoming violent and aggressive.

In fact, experts say that Xanax may very well have been the cause of the rampage. Why did journalists mostly ignore this detail? Who knows…perhaps it’s because they’re so likely to be under mood control drugs, themselves. /shrug

Now even people who know they’re taking that drug, and that it may cause them to become criminally aggressive, can be driven to act nuts by it…imagine some animal that doesn’t even know there’s a drug involved (probably doesn’t even understand the concept), who is being drugged.

I wouldn’t want to be around a collie or retriever who’d been driven mad by drugs, nor riding a horse in such a state.

So what’s the response of Big Brotherment to this incident?

Why, to ban the sale of ALL PRIMATES, of course.

Yes, that’s right; they are passing a ban on the sale of 1 inch long mouse lemurs, and all other primates, because some idiot prescribed a drug drug that can cause violent rages, to a 200 lb chimp.

If we were actually going to try to pass some over-reaching law to retroactively prevent this laughably rare, even isolated incident, surely it’d be something like “you can’t give huge apes drugs that might make them insane”, or even a ban on mood-control drugs entirely, which would be a loss ONLY insofar as prohibition is bad.

The truth is, of course, that one of the most vile things politicians do is try to pass laws based on single incidents. The already-suicidal chick who killed herself after someone else’s mom mocked her online has spawned a host of vile laws that are already being extended to speech outside their original intent, for example. Or the crazy Brady Law, that effectively banned only weapons that were not using in the shooting of its namesake. Or the ridiculous “security” measures set up after 9-11, that do zero to actually prevent future terror attacks. How, precisely, will you hijack a jumbo jet with nail clippers and a four ounce sippy cup?

Of course such laws are almost never passed by people who care about the incident at hand.  They’re dishonest people who are actually attempting to forward some agenda of their own. In the case of Representative Blumenauer, author of the primate ban, he’s apparently one of those “pets are slaves” PETA nut-jobs, who has openly said that reptiles are next on his list of ban victims.

What we need, really, is fewer laws, not more of them. Banning the sale of lemurs so small that they’re are in danger of being eaten by mice, in response to the drugging of a man-sized ape, seems like one of those “Romans got brain damage from lead-lined aquaducts, and then things all went to hell” moments.

Representative Blumenauer appears to think these baby monkeys should be banned as a choking hazard.

March 26, 2009 Posted by kazvorpal | Philosophy, Politics, Society | apes, choice, congress, depression, green, liberalism, liberty, peta, pets, socialism | 24 Comments