Team Chimp

Like all Big Money U.S. court cases, this one was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. All the same, the case created a national stir, becoming the hot topic around the water coolers and internet chat rooms. It was a quirky case, full of strange tidings, hollow threats and New Age Hippie Love. In case you were in outer space or in a coma for the last week, here’s a rundown on the events you missed.

The case: The Animal Rights Activists Organization

Vs.

TeamChimp

It all started when a group of Primate Biologists from Pepperdine University won a grant from the U.S. Review of Primate Behavior to study Teamwork Development amongst a group of twenty-five chimpanzees. The chimps lived at the San Diego Zoo, so they had adapted to balmy conditions and being pampered; the group of chimps consisted of men, women, children, the young and the old, spayed and pregnant, neutered and gay. All walks of life in the chimpanzee community were represented at the San Diego Zoo.

The crew of biologists consisted of Grad Students from Pepperdine and an absentee professor named David Gwynn, the Dean of Biological Resources at Pepperdine. As was later revealed in court documents, Dr. Gwynn did not participate in the study---he simply signed a few official documents for the crew of Grad Students and sent them on to San Diego with a few words of elitist encouragement and full trust in his crews capabilities. Dr. Gwynn would later claim, before a jury and under oath, that this was his sole mistake in the debacle that the world now knows as TeamChimp.

When the biologists arrived at the San Diego Zoo for the first time, they had no concrete plans on how to teach these chimps teamwork. Instead of conceptualizing a cutting-edge process to their study plans, the Grad Students sat on a bench in the shade beside the Primate Pit and watched the chimps interact. The students all laughed when the chimp named Butch Willy pulled an orange Bic lighter out from beneath his ass, grabbed a half-smoked cigarette and lit up in front of the crowd of inner-city third graders in attendance. Butch Willy went from chimp to chimp with the cigarette and made each one inhale a drag of smoke. The biologists saw this, pulled out pens and notepads and scribbled a few jots: Butch Willy was a leader and was going to be the epicenter of whatever experiment that they developed.

Now, we all know Butch Willy as TeamChimps Smoking Quarterback, but obviously the Nicotine Freak came from humble origins.

That first day at the San Diego Zoo, as the sun set and the chimps were brought inside for the night, the biologists met their new primate coworkers for the first time. Most of the chimps were crowded into a corner, busy trying to avoid the newcomers by studying their own toes, but Butch Willy bravely confronted the Primate Biologists by screaming in chimpanzee and flicking the orange lighter on and off, on and off, over and over again.

When Chad Settle, a young Grad Student with buzzed blonde hair and an athletes stocky build, gave Butch Willy a cigarette, the chimp calmed and preceded to crawl all over the crew of biologists. As soon as Butch Willy lit the cigarette, the other chimps left their crowded corner and serenaded him with hoots and hollers. They wanted a drag; most of them were craving nicotine.

As the world now knows, when the crew of Grad Students saw Butch Willy distribute hits on the cigarette to his fiending co-chimps, they knew that they had an easy way to control the proceedings of their study. And to the objective scientist, control of all variables is an essential facet in the engineering of the outcome of an experiment. Precedence has shown that chimpanzees, and all primates for that matter, are easiest to manipulate and train when they have Total Need of that which they can’t get alone.

In lab conditions, this can even mean food or shelter. Or, in one infamous study, oxygen. But Animal Rights Activists long ago protested these studies and their brutal, reptilian-brain based antics and procured a legal end to them.

But none of these Animal Rights Activists ever thought that the entire group of twenty-five chimps at the San Diego Zoo would become addicted to nicotine. These poor, ignorant chimps, they were addicted to nicotine and needed to score some every several hours to stay happy. Their famous smiles---plastered all over travel brochures from Tokyo to Montreal---depended on whether the nicotine fix was in or not. When the Grad Students left the zoo that first night, they still had no plans on the proceedings of their study. But they were certain that the easiest route to getting the chimps to cooperate was to control their access to cigarettes.

It wasn’t until the next weekend when Chad Settle and the Grad Students came up with the Million Dollar Idea to teach the chimps to play tackle football. All week, the domesticated chimps were poked and prodded, given an array of psychological tests to determine the boring medium of their set of twenty-five. In science, in America, everything has to be standardized, all elements must be controlled, or else it’s not cutting edge, it’s not American. Once the Grad Students had all of the paperwork complete, they played with the chimps to study the hallowed uniqueness of the Primate Reaction that they’d read so much about while being hip and bearded under-grads. And indeed, the clean shaven Grad Students remarked on the fact that even though all of the chimps were naked and looked the same, it was obvious that each one had its own personality. Especially Butch Willy.

These famous chimps, they weren’t devoid of all feelings like slimy fish, said one of the Grad Students.

Simply Amazing. An animal with traits of individuality? Simply Amazing.

Because of this project—what the world now knows as TeamChimp—sturdy Chad Settle hadn’t been to the gym all week. So that weekend at the zoo, he brought a football along to toss around on lunch break; he figured that he’d break a sweat at the least, engage in a game of three on three at the most.

He definitely didn’t expect the multi-million dollar ordeal its become.

The Grad Students were standing beside the Primate Pit, finishing lunch, when Chad grabbed the authentic leather NFL football and began a game of catch. Of course, Butch Willy was immediately interested. Down in the Primate Pit, he sauntered to the edge of his boundary—which was a deep moat filled with foul, trash laden water—and he screamed continuously, without seeming to stop for breath, until Chad acknowledged him and held the football high enough for him to see.

Every time that Chad hid the football, Butch Willy went bonkers, and not even cigarettes could deter his attention. At length, Chad tossed the football over the rancid moat and into the Primate Pit, where Butch Willy corralled it into his arms, sat on his orange lighter and picked tenderly at the balls white lacing.

It was only then that Butch Willy had a smoke.

Or so the legal representatives of TeamChimp would like America to think. In court, before the entire scandal was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, TeamChimp always emphasized that to both the chimps and the Grad Students, football always came before cigarettes.

The Grad Students said that they taught the chimps to play football in full pads as a creative way to test the development of teamwork—exactly what the U.S. government gave them a grant to do. The millions of dollars that they reaped through YouTube and then the large Chinese television audience, was just a fortunate effect of an ingenious cause.

The Animal Rights Activists thought differently. The first time that TeamChimp played football on live television in the United States, fifty-thousand offended Twenty-Something’s surrounded the stadium and protested. There is little doubt that the organizers of that fifty-thousand-plus mob of lazy young adults performed Pagan Rituals on All Hallows Eve and were also affiliated with the Animal Rights Activists—in court, the case never moved far enough along for us to fully determine that truth.

Some Alternative News sources, owned by holding companies of the Big Five Media Monsters, reported that the protest consisted of random demographics of normal everyday people, people who were honestly indignant over TeamChimp and what had recently been revealed by the Big Five Media Monsters: The chimps played football to fuel their nicotine addiction; that even though the chimps were earning millions of dollars for TeamChimp, they were barely getting enough cigarettes to quell their cravings.

In court, after a series of preliminaries and junctions to delay the trial, after countless courtroom shenanigans—the Animal Rights Activists Organization even tried to have Butch Willy testify before the jury, but all that he could manage was a slew of simian howls—the case came down to one question: What came first for the chimps, football or cigarettes?

It was just the type of moral question that Americans love to get involved in. If the chimps were already addicted to nicotine before the football season began, than it was blatantly apparent that they were being exposed to a dangerous game that they didn’t comprehend, simply to fuel an addiction.

An addiction, the Animal Rights Activists Organization often pointed out, that could easily be appeased just by living in the Primate Pit at the San Diego Zoo, which was always littered with smokable cigarette butts. No, to the Animal Rights Activists, this addiction was being exploited so that the Grad Students could use the chimps to earn ‘buku bucks’.

So, while those fifty-thousand protesters surrounded the stadium during that first game on U.S. soil, on the field something esoteric blossomed and America was hooked. Butch Willy broke free around the right end for an eighty yard touchdown, climbed the goalposts and pulled off his pants in front of the sold-out stadium. It’s still on YouTube, and was a finalist for SportsCenters Play of the Month. The protests of fifty-thousand indignant peaceniks was drowned out by the ten-million beer swilling Americans that tuned in to channel four that afternoon. As the inaugural TeamChimp motto claimed: Ain’t America Grand, Butch?

Chad Settle never finished the Pepperdine University graduate program and he never became a Primate Biologist. Instead, he became the head coach of the worlds first football team of chimps. He toyed with the idea of having one of the two San Diego Zoo teams play against Pee-Wee football champions or even against teams of adult midgets. But after corporate agents from Beijing met with him and offered a multi-million dollar television deal for the hip and westernized coastal Chinese market, he concentrated solely on chimp-versus-chimp contests.

He eventually organized a network of chimp football teams throughout the U.S., each team stationed at a famous city zoo. The Denver Zoos team won the first—and possibly the last—Chimp Bowl. This was nearly a year ago, the same time that the Animal Rights Activists Organization formally filed a lawsuit against TeamChimp. The allegations were ominous and meant potential lengthy stays in prison for Chad Settle and the other Grad Students who were there from the beginning. The complaints were of animal cruelty, misappropriation of government funds, knowingly breaking a legally binding contract, and a slew of petty offenses unique to each persons actions in the matter.

In an interview on 60 Minutes last week, Chad Settle said that the moment Butch Willy saw a football he went ‘bananas’, it was love at first sight. Chad said that as soon as Butch Willy was carrying the football around, throwing it at the Grad Students and catching their throws, the other chimps got interested. “Pretty soon”, Chad said as tears of nostalgia blossomed in his eyes, “all of the chimps loved football”.

Chad Settle began to cry and said, “It was magical”.

Most of America agreed, and the next day the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

The Animal Rights Activists Organization, although not fully pleased with the settlement, issued a public statement saying that the chimps were going to detox from nicotine for six months. This was the important thing, the Activist Organization claimed, the sole reason that they pressed charges in the first place—to make sure that the chimps would be saved from the intoxicating chemical chains that bound them.

So there you have it—TeamChimp has been a long-term development, but up until this last week, beside most of eastern China, only a rare sort of person paid more than cursory dues to this cross-species phenomenon. Namely, they were Middle American Sports Phanatics with part-time jobs at best, for the most part still living at their moms house.

But now it’s here, it’s on the mainland and it’s on television in about an hour. Chad Settle’s San Diego Zoo Demons are playing the New Orleans Zoo Katrina’s. Butch Willy’s still the quarterback for the San Diego team, although his hair is going gray and his eyes cloudy white. He refused to enter nicotine rehab, and the sports fans constantly supply him with cigarettes, so when he’s sitting on the sidelines with his helmet off, watching the defense do its thing, he still smokes. So do all of the chimps on his team.

i really think

i like it!

needs work.

Comments

SimoneJanuary 26, 2009

If you only knew how much everyone at illiterate smokes, you'd understand why this piece touches a very special string in my heart.

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