Elmo Thumb and Ben Boeing
going bananas on love

Elmo Thumb and Ben Boeing were gibbons. Gibbons belong to the ape family. Other apes include chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas.

Monkeys do not belong to the ape family. Monkeys walk on all four legs and have tails. Gibbons have no tails and walk upright. Monkeys, gibbons and humans are however all primates. Apes are so close to humans in DNA that hey should be considered as people.

Mrs. DoLittle has discovered that baby gibbons are very similar to human babies. They cry when they are hungry and laugh when they are happy. They also giggle when you tickle them and smile. They frown when they poo their pants and coo when you clean them. They also don't start walking until they are about one year old, just like human babies.

Mrs. DoLittle really couldn't find any difference between them and humans, except of course that they are hairy and after age one they don't start speaking English or Thai. However if they are contented they start singing gibbon songs. Gibbons in the wild sing about their environment, their family relations, their neighbors, and even where the food is.

A most depressing thing to see is a gibbon in captivity that does not sing. Living in a cage leaves nothing to sing about. At one point Mrs. Dolittle had seven little gibbons with `pampers' on, hooting and singing from dawn till dusk. They seemed to have a lot to sing about living in a house, being carried around all day and sleeping in Mrs. DoLittle's bed.

Ben Boeing (left) and Elmo Thumb (right)

Why were they with Mrs. DoLittle when they should have been with their real mothers? Well that's a sad story. Most gibbons and monkeys in captivity have the same traumatic beginning. The mother is shot by hunters who profit by selling the baby.

Gibbons are called the acrobats of the forest because they swing across the treetops and it is impossible to take aim at one with a rifle and shoot it. So therefore the hunters shoot aimlessly into the treetops with machine guns and just pick up whatever falls to the ground. The mothers get eaten. Baby gibbons cling tightly to their mothers for the first year and never let go. The hunters sometimes cut the babies fingers off to get it off the dead mother.

Little Elmo only had his thumb left on one hand when the Forestry Department
brought him to Mrs. DoLittle to care for. He was handicapped for life and would
never be able to swing in the treetops. He was however lucky. Ben Boeing had been planned to be the hunter's dinner. To keep him `fresh' he was not immediately killed. stead, one of his arms and of his legs were broken so he
wouldn't escape. He found tied to the hunter's belt.

Ben Boeing lived for a year with Mrs .DoLittle. During time he had nightmares almost every night and woke screaming. Sometimes he had seizures during which he bit his tongue until it was purple. One day he had a heart attack and died in my arms. I buried him under his favorite tree where I used to hang him in a basket so he could look at the butterflies and feel the breeze. I called him Ben Boeing cause he flew in an airplane from Bangkok to Chiangmai to come stay with me. He also had a basket, which he loved to hang in and watch to television. When he got excited over something he saw, the basket would bounce up and down and go 'boing', 'boing'. In between his nightmares he had loads of love. When he woke in the morning to see another day, he would go bananas for love. He couldn't get enough of it. When he got smothered with kisses he would laugh. It was the only time he forgot his problems. So we would do it all the time.

The moral of this story is: It's not always who you are in life, or what you know
that gets you places, it's WHO you know!