You may have seen the YouTube footage of an orangutan cooling her face with a wet towel. Filmed on a sweltering day in August at Tama Zoological Park in Tokyo, the ape is seen dipping a towel in a pond, wringing it out, and patting it on her face.
The clip was posted on news sites around the world, and has been viewed more than 1 million times. Why the fascination? The usual interest with any great ape using a tool or doing something funny at a zoo? Yes, but in this case we can also closely identify with what she's doing — we've all done the same thing on a hot summer's day — and that forcefully brings home our similarities to apes. When I looked at it I followed a whole load of other links to orangutans doing stuff in zoos.
Whatever you think about zoos and the conditions that animals are kept in — Ueno Zoo in particular, opened in 1882, has been criticized for the cramped living areas that animals have to endure — they allow close observation of animals that is difficult in the wild.