This is pretty wild, but daycare is pretty damn expensive. Would anybody here do it?
{b]Primates as Caregivers to Human Offspring
Dr. Galen Krokum
Chair of Applied Primate Research
University of California, San Diego
For decades, primate research has yielded rich dividends to mankind in our knowledge of psychology, medicine, and even in space, but these benefits have only had an indirect effect on our daily lives and most mundane tasks—until now.
Today, primate research is taking a great leap forward as apes begin to work among us to solve some of our most pressing problems. One of these is daycare. Since the feminist revolution in the 1960s, more and more women have moved into the workforce, dramatically increasing our nation’s productivity, but this move creates a dilemma for women at the bottom of the pay-scale, and even more so as recent welfare reform forces single mothers out of the house and into a McDonald’s drive up window: who is going to take care of the children?
Placing one child in even the shoddiest of daycare can easily cost as much as a minimum wage worker makes in a week, and if she is the mother of two or more children, the chances of making more than her childcare costs are slim to none.
At first glance, this presents two alternatives, equally unpleasant: either the state subsidizes the mother staying at home to care for her own children, or the state pays for their daycare so the mother can work.
Apes can break this deadlock by providing childcare for a fraction of what a human caregiver costs.
A typical lowland gorilla eats the equivalent of four to five heads of lettuce a day and about a quart of termites and grubs. They only require the most rudimentary of shelter and medical attention. Total cost per day: $8.
Pilot projects have shown that one female gorilla can provide care for three human children who walk or crawl, or four infants. This lowers the daily cost to $2-3 per child per day. Even with our planned profit margin of $7 per child, we will be providing childcare for about a third or fourth as much as the going rate in San Diego County.
In addition to cost savings, gorillas offer several other advantages. A recent study at Johns Hopkins University found that most human daycare providers are sedentary women who largely ignore children and spend their time on the phone, watching soap operas, and smoking. By contrast, gorillas are profoundly affectionate and physically active. Rather than let a child listlessly watch TV, our gorillas are more likely to tickle or groom them, or playfully beat them with a tire, accelerating development of fine motor and social skills. Children enjoy this so much that parents often have difficulty coaxing them out of the trees when it is time to go home.
Some have voiced concerns that the gorillas may harm or even eat some of the children left in their care. This is almost completely unfounded. Gorillas in the wild rarely attack humans unprovoked, and the recent escape and biting incident in Pittsburg was because the gorilla mistook an obese woman in an orange dress for a pumpkin, one of her favorite foods.
Human caregivers have been known to do far worse to children, sexually abusing them, selling them to foreign child pornography rings, or using them in Satanic religious rituals as many therapists have found through recovered memories, as seen on the May 18, 1987 episode of the Geraldo Rivera Show.
Thousands of years ago, man domesticated the horse and dog to take over some of the burden of herding livestock. A few thousand years from now, domesticating gorillas to herd our children will be remembered as at least as great an achievement.
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