Monkeys no joking
matter for activists

A reader writes: "There is no polite way to put it. You are either an idiot or really stupid or perhaps a little retarded."

That's what you get when you make a few monkey jokes.

I should know better. Every time I make a joke about a monkey, a gorilla, an orangutan or anything along the primate line, I get hammered by animal rights wackos. The amount of hostility dissipates as I move down the animal "cuteness" scale. Joking about puppies, kittens, baby skinks and kinkajous induces severe animosity, especially if used in conjunction with the words "entree," "juggling" or "bowling." The antipathy gets a little less when you get to whales and dolphins. Very little rancor is roused when joking about tuna and wildebeests. And animal rights activists seem strangely unconcerned about jokes involving mollusks, amoebas and Bavarian jumping spiders.

So I should have known I would get hate mail when I wrote a column last week making a few jokes about bar monkeys. There's a bar in town, the Blue Tropix, that apparently has some monkeys on display in a glass enclosure. Animal-rights people and most sensitive columnists are outraged about it.

I'm fairly sensitive, but my Outrage Meter is set at a different range from the fringe animal-rights people. I'm outraged that terrorists would take women and children hostage in Russia and then kill them. I'm outraged that there's a religious sect that encourages children to become suicide bombers. I'm outraged at the price of red bell peppers. I'm not outraged that a single bar owner in Honolulu is dumb enough to put some monkeys on display.

I think it's stupid. And the way I express that feeling is through satire, by saying something like "Do monkeys belong in nightclubs? As long as they abide by the city's no-smoking law, don't hassle the chicks and can hold their liquor, why not?" I went on in last week's column to say the bar monkeys are exhibiting the kind of stress "one would expect from a creature who 24/7 finds himself separated by a 2-inch glass wall from a bottle of Cuervo Gold."

IT SEEMED LIKE a fairly innocuous and relatively harmless reference to primate alcoholism, and not a very funny one at that. It's probably the line that caused the reader to call me "a little retarded." I thought that accusation was particularly insulting to retarded people everywhere, especially coming from someone supposedly concerned about the feelings of the less sentient.

Rational thought is never the strong suit for those occupying the high country of animal-rights extremism. This reader is still upset about how monkeys were treated at the Pearl City Tavern, an establishment that closed more than a decade ago. Sweetie, get over it.

All I have to say is 1) I love monkeys and hate to see them abused, and 2) Osama bin Laden is lucky there weren't any monkeys, puppies, rhinos or dolphins in the twin towers when he destroyed them or he'd REALLY be in trouble.