Mass Murderers are animals

So are other people; we have more in common with the animal kingdom in some way than most people realize.

Animals that have dysfunctional child hoods also become violent when they turn into adults. The similarity is clearest when you look at our closest animal relatives including Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Orangutans and even Baboons. Jane Goodall has found that when a baby Chimpanzee is abused by their mother they also become abusive to their children. She also found that Chimpanzees participate in what could be considered primitive warfare. There were chimpanzee communities that fought with other chimpanzee communities over territory similar to what primitive tribes may have done thousands of years ago.

When Chimpanzees Gorillas or even Lions are removed from their environment at a young age they don't learn how to take care of themselves in the wild and become domesticated. This has been demonstrated by many researchers of wild animals including work studying Primates, Lions, dogs and many other animals. Domesticated animals rarely if ever can be returned to the wild without the help of a reintegration program by those that know how to reeducate the animals. This is because when they take the animal out of the wild they disrupt their education system that has been set up by nature. When children are uprooted from their environment as a result of a more or the diverse of parents they often encounter transitional problems especially if they don't receive help. This has also proven to be a problem for foster children who are moved from one foster home to another.

The disruption of communities can also be seen on a much larger scale when different forms of government have been disrupted. When the Europeans took over many less developed countries they disrupted the tribal government. Then when they left and control was handed back to the natives in many cases the natives didn’t know how to handle the new power. In this case the new leaders often became tyrants like Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe. The problem here is that the previous form of government was forgotten and there was never an education system set up to teach the public how to create a new form of government. Other societies that succeeded in setting up republics that are much more civil in the past did so because they had a segment of the population that understand how to set up a reasonably good government although these have rarely if ever been perfect. When the Europeans were in power they followed the same procedure that deprived the local population of the education they needed that the southern slave owners did in the pre- civil war US. By making sure the natives didn’t have a good education they made sure they couldn’t challenge their authority. This later meant that without a good education they couldn’t challenge the authority of the tyrants that took over after the Europeans left. Without the Europeans they just wound up replacing one set of tyrannical government with another. This will continue to be the case at least until the people are allowed the opportunity to receive a good education and they know how to govern themselves again. This doesn’t have to mean returning to tribal ways but they were better than what they have now and it is worth considering so that they can restore the good aspects of the tribal ways. They can also incorporate the best aspects of more advanced democracies into the new form of government when they develop it.

On big difference between man and other animals is their ability to set up educational systems. When people spend more time with their children they can teach them to be much more productive and civilized than other animals. But if they only teach them part of the job they often become dysfunctional. People have a much better research and educational system. This has been true for thousands of years; however they haven’t been giving all people equal opportunity for a good education. By withholding education from a large segment of society they maintain a powerful class system where some people have more rights than others and the education they need to stand up for their rights. One of the biggest advantages people could have is the enormous amount of academic work that has been done over the past hundred years. There has been an enormous amount of advancement in the understanding of human behavior in many subjects including psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, criminology etc. they have all found a significant amount of research that indicates how important the early child rearing is to our culture and how this could affect violence prevention. Unfortunately this message isn’t getting across to the public so in order to take full advantage of this there needs to be a much better education system set up and ideally there should be a better public awareness program to let adults know more about the subject.

First posted on Tripod on 12/05/09

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