Oh, sure. They report on the orangutans at Zoo Atlanta playing video games in an approving tone. They make it sound like a good thing.
The orangutans use a touch screen built into a tree-like structure that blend in with their zoo habitat. Visitors watch from a video monitor in front of the exhibit.
"That's so cool," Jeri McCarthy told her three daughters as Bernas drew a red, blue and yellow picture on the screen. "He can't get enough!"
Zoo officials hope the exhibit will raise awareness of the rapidly diminishing wild orangutan population, which is on track to completely disappear in the next decade, and potentially provide keys to their survival.
"The more we understand about orangutan's cognitive processes, the more we'll understand about what they need to survive in the wild," said Tara Stoinski, manager of conservation partnerships for the zoo. "It enables us to show the public how smart they are."
In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals — correct answers are rewarded with food pellets. Another game lets them draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen. Printouts of their masterpieces are on display in the zoo.
But our informants tell us that there is another, darker, side to this story. The orangutans are actually agents of the Animal Uprising™. At night, when nobody is watching them, they use their computers to get on the internet. They are playing internet poker and winning big money which is being funneled to the animal overlords to finance their plots. It turns out that orangutans are very good at poker. The chimpanzees, meanwhile, are actually running a spam ring which dumps comment and trackback spam onto blogs. As for the spider monkeys, our code of conduct here in the Crabitat forbids us from discussing what they are doing. Let's just say it's a new low in the "adult entertainment" industry.
They are dumbing those poor animals down to the level of our kids! What is next, re-runs of Rosie and Oprah?