An Eyewitness Example

 

An Eye Witnessed Example

 

 

Before partition, I happened to be in a Hindu state Indragadh many times where some of my relatives were posted on high positions. In the state, killing monkey was illegal, and therefore they were thousands in number. Being naughty,  clever  and  troublesome  instinctively,  monkeys would cause damages, as they would run away with utensils and clothes.

 

 

Once people thought of an idea to get rid of them. They mixed poison with flour and scattered the bread made of it on the roof, so that monkeys would eat and die. Sitting in a corner, they waited for monkeys to come, eat and die. After a while some of them came and observed the unusual scene of scattered breads. For sure, they must have sensed something fishy in the matter, as they examined the bread loaves and carefully smelled them. Thus, they moved away without touching them. People thought they had failed.

 

 

Suddenly the clever monkey gang came back with more monkeys along and they sat around scattered breads in circle.  After  a little while  a  monkey moved  forward  and smelled the bread, and then another moved ahead and tore a piece  of  bread,  smelled  them  and  all  ran  away.  By  then people believed that monkeys got wise to the whole thing and their plan had failed. But after sometime, came a gang of around 70 monkeys, everyone with a green bough having fresh leaves. They tore breads into pieces, distributed, ate them up and in the last chewed green leaves as antidote to poison and went their ways. People were just dumbfounded to have wasted bread and time and having failed to achieve their aim.

 

The scene suggested that green leaves were antidote which monkeys knew. Now if human claims that only he knows about the medical use of herbs, it is wrong, because monkeys too may claim the same. When it has become clear that animals too have doctors and physicians who can give medical treatment but even stop an illness with precautionary measures, the claim of human superiority again remain unproven. Humans and monkeys are similar in being medically aware with relative difference only in the degree of awareness.