The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingThe Rhesus Macaque - Issue Eighteen
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The Rhesus Macaque, photo from Christian ArtusoThe Rhesus Macaque is brown or grey in color and has a pink face, and they are both arboreal and terrestrial. They are quadrupedal and, when on the ground, they walk digitigrade and plantigrade. Adult males measure approximately 53 cm tall on average and weigh about 7.7 kg and they are mostly herbivorous, feeding on mainly fruit, but also eating seeds, roots, buds, bark, and cereals, as well as some insects. Rhesus macaques are native to northern India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and southern China. They have the widest geographic ranges of any nonhuman primate, occupying a great diversity of altitudes; they may be found in grasslands, woodlands, arid open areas, and in mountainous regions up to 2,500 m in elevation. They are regular swimmers. Perhaps because humans and macaques apparently share about 93% of their DNA sequence and shared a common ancestor roughly 25 million years ago, Rhesus macaques are noted for their tendency to move from rural to urban areas, coming to rely on handouts or refuse from humans. Due to its relatively easy upkeep in captivity, wide availability and closeness to humans anatomically and physiologically, it has been used extensively in medical, biological, and psychological research. Even though, in psychological research, rhesus macaques have demonstrated a variety of complex cognitive abilities, including the ability to make same-different judgments, understand simple rules, monitor their own mental states, and have even been shown to demonstrate self-agency, an important type of self-awareness, the rhesus macaque was used in the well-known experiments on maternal deprivation carried out in the 1950s by controversial comparative psychologist Harry Harlow. The U.S. Army and NASA launched rhesus macaques into outer space during the 1950s and 1960s, and the Soviet/Russian space program launched them into space as recently as 1997. One of these primates was allowed to return alive. In January, 2001 a Rhesus macaque, the first transgenic primate carried foreign genes originally from a jellyfish.

   


Carved into the Bar

By

Colin Dodds

Ex-Boyfriends and ex-girlfriends
wander in from the rain,
with magic-marker X's on their hands.

A man needs a woman
like a fish needs a fishhook
,
the men had carved into the bar.

But after a day in the office,
I look at a canary
and dream of a cage.

I smile,
try to pass for effortless,
but wind up arguing all night

with the woman next to me
about whether or not
we can control how we feel.


Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He’s the author of several novels, including WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” Dodds’ screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

Colin has a book out too: Wisdom’s Real opposite—101 Poems about an Odyssey on a Stool and Wisdom’s Real opposite—101 Poems about an Odyssey on a Stool

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