Santino is my hero

Imagine being restrained in a small prison yard all day with nothing to do except pace until being locked up in a tiny cell at night, imagine living like this for years on end; to compound your misery, imagine having endless streams of uncomprehending jailers passing by every day shouting, gawking and taunting you, imagine suffering all this and having done absolutely nothing wrong, what would you do?

You may be asking yourself where this injustice is going on, is it Burma perhaps or Tibet , maybe Saudi-Arabia, no, must be a woeful tale from "Camp Justice" then; but you would be wrong on all counts, this is happening in one of the richest and most socially advanced societies in the world, Sweden, where the social care system for its inhabitants is second to none.

Santino (our hero) did not take his captivity lying down however, showing true grit and determination he carefully planned coordinated attacks on his captors, pelting them with stones and rocks from little stock-piles that he had accumulated in advance, he memorised their patrols and was ready for them delivering a hail of spite and defiance at every opportunity. He even devised a system for sonically testing the concrete walls of his cell to determine areas of frost damage and therefore future supplies of ammunition.

Santino is tough, Santino is a survivor and Santino is a chimpanzee.

Separated from us by just a tiny fraction of the molecules in his DNA, he shows us that our much vaunted (supposedly unique) human intellectual abilities of forward planning and rational thinking are nothing more than speculative arrogance on our part.

In a somewhat draconian, but I guess predictable, turn of events Santino's human keepers decided to cut his balls off to "calm him down", apparently he's much "better" now.

[Cue Scooby doo wavy screen effect] I imagine that our ancestors wondering the Pleistocene
grass lands would have understood Santino, driven by fear and anger they too found innovative solutions to their problems, lucky for us that they did it first.

For the full story see here