Editorial: Low-status primates & chicken-manure
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:
In hindsight, the Oklahoma City bombing seems predictable, as a reversion of
low-status males to a form of basic animal behavior observed to varying degree among most
primates, as well as some canine, feline, avian, and fish societies:
Excluded from mating opportunities and other currency of the animal world, the
low-status males form a parallel troop of their own at the fringe of the tribe. Within that all-
male troop, obsessed by status, the low-ranking males establish and defend a superficially
rigid but fragile hierarchy of their own. Eventually, emboldened by numbers, they risk
raids on the main tribe, killing the offspring of low-status females who are not well-defend-
ed by the males of dominant and secondary rank. The vulnerability of the young is indeed
often how the low-status males determine which females may be accessible to them,
through a mating strategy amounting to psychologically coerced rape, if not overt rape.
The equation of often only momentary vulnerability with lower status is indicative
of the low-status males’ frequent inability to read more subtle social cues, which in turn
often explains why they are low-status males to begin with. Certainly there is no reason to
believe the victims in Oklahoma City were of lower status in our society in any respect
except in the eyes of their attackers, to whom their vulnerability to a truckload of refined
chicken manure signified expendability in the pursuit of power. Note that Henry Kissinger,
another enthusiastic bomber at the zenith of his own influence, once defined power as the
ultimate aphrodisiac. The only other indication of lesser status one could assign to the
Oklahoma City victims, with a certain sensitive reluctance, would be the need of many for
government-sponsored workplace daycare, since upper-rank families in our society enjoy
the luxury of being able to provide their children with in-home care. It is worth pointing out
in this regard that the daycare provided in the blast-shattered Alfred P. Murrah building was
considered to be of an elite quality, as workplace daycare goes.