Senior year of high school, our chemistry teacher had us watch the movie 12 Monkeys. Not because it had any chemical lesson (although I’d love to talk to Mr. Sayles about Covid, and maybe I should email him), but because he thought it was a good movie. He also showed us Schindler’s List. He thought everyone should see that at some point in their lives.
One quick spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen 12 Monkeys, you’re probably too late already, but you can opt out of the blog post now, because there’s a semi-important plot point we’re going to reveal.
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Ok, they’re out. All of us still in here either watched 12 Monkeys or don’t want to. *turns toward the side of the room that watched it* Aren’t those guys missing out? *turns toward the side of the room that hasn’t* You guys are missing out.
So the deal with 12 Monkeys is that the people everyone thinks released the virus actually just released a bunch of animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. PETA move. Except the releasers also locked a guy in a cage, which is not necessarily a PETA move? I don’t know. I bet PETA peeps are kinky.
Thankfully, whoever’s up to these things in Dallas is not releasing all the animals. What’s happening, instead, is that a leopard was released, some monkeys were almost released, a vulture died suspiciously, and two more monkeys were stolen and then found. The Dallas Morning News has the details on the latest, the monkey caper, but the summary is this:
- The clouded leopard’s enclosure was cut earlier this month, and the leopard escaped, but it stayed in the zoo and was found.
- The langur monkeys’ enclosure was found cut after that (cuts could have happened at the same time, we think, the second cut was found the day after the leopard escaped), but those monkeys stayed put in their enclosure.
- An endangered lappet-faced vulture, 35 years old and named Pin, died shortly after the leopard incident, found with a suspicious wound. Zoo officials have said it doesn’t look like natural death.
- Two emperor tamarin monkeys went missing a few days after the vulture’s death, and the enclosure—like those of the leopard and the langur monkeys—was found to have been cut. These monkeys were found in a closet in an uninhabited house on a church’s property twenty minutes away (the church is trying to turn the house into a community house), and it sounds like they’re ok.
The only suspect—and it isn’t clear if he’s a suspect—is a guy of whom police released a picture asking for information about the missing monkeys. If I read that Dallas Morning News article correctly before I got paywalled out of it, the church’s pastor’s family recognized him as someone who’d attended their church and they thought might be frequenting the house where the monkeys were eventually found. Was he the guy, and did he also cut the leopard’s enclosure and the other monkeys’ enclosure?
I believe we’ve been told the first two cuts—the ones that didn’t result in thefts—looked the same as one another, but I don’t know if we’ve been told that the third looked like the first two. Also, the leopard enclosure is right by both sets of monkeys, but the vulture is a long ways away. Finally, I’m not a zoo expert. I don’t know how often this kind of thing happens at other zoos. Are people always trying to kill vultures? Or is that pretty probably connected to the leopard and monkey situations? Most importantly: Is Brad Pitt involved or is he not?
We’ll keep an eye out for details. I don’t know which zoos are good for animals and which are bad for them, but stealing animals from zoos is definitely bad for the animals in question, as is killing them. Leave them be!
