Where My Loyalties Lie

I am a mammal. As such, I feel a sense of solidarity with my classmates, and I confess that I am a bit chauvinistic about my Class. We are, you know, the apex of evolution on this planet. All the other Classes were just way stations for our ancestors or amusing evolutionary side trips. I am not averse to eating some classmates, although I aim to be respectful and mammalian in my treatment of them.

The marsupials and monotremes are not as mammalian as I would like, and I am not sure whether they are really “in”. Sure, they give milk and all, but what about the all-important placenta? It’s plain primitive if you ask me.

Of course, not all mammals are equal. I regard members of my Order, the primates, to be the apex of the apex, as it were. No way would I eat an order-mate. Not that I dislike the other Orders. Some of my best friends are carnivores. I live with carnivores. I wouldn’t eat a carnivore, either. I am especially loyal to the Order, however. On the other hand, I’ll mess you up if you mess with the carnivores who are my friends even if you are a primate.

Then again, there’s the Family, and that takes precedence over the Order in some cases. It doesn’t come up much, but if I had to choose between a New World monkey and a fellow ape, I’d have to go with the ape. It’s all about the Family in the end.

The genus? It goes without saying. We’ve only got the one species in the genus! We have to stick together. Eating a conspecific is out of the question, except in an emergency, and I’d have to side with a conspecific in a dispute with a chimpanzee, unless I knew the chimpanzee personally or the human was a douchebag.

My kin in proportion to our degree of relatedness trumps the species, however, except that my wife, whose most recent common ancestor with me probably died 600 years ago, beats out any of my blood kin. And friends and associates, depending on how close they are, beat out remote kin. It’s kind of like the way I feel about primates who are strangers and carnivores whom I know personally. Neighbors are important, too. It says somewhere in the Bible that a friendly neighbor at hand is better than a brother a hundred miles a way, or some such thing. There are a lot of exceptions, but in general my closer kin come before more remote kin. Unless my kinsman is a douchebag, in which case he can forget about that kidney.