I’ve said it a million times, but I’ll say it again: I love apes. They are just funny to me. They’re like freaky little people, and they appear to have a wonderful sense of humor. An ape just makes things better. Take any movie, television show or even a dinner party, add an ape and it becomes simply hilarious to me. I truly want to believe the above statements, but it appears to be getting a little harder lately. I never thought I would say this, but I may soon have to rethink my ape position. Apparently, those wonderful little creatures can also be a little bit scary.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the ape that maimed a lady, and I also recently read an article in Esquire Magazine about a couple of apes that went ape-shit, um literally, and almost killed a man. See, that’s not really funny. I’ll admit I like all those Planet of the Apes movies, but there’s nothing funny about apes being aggressive. OK, the Planet of the Apes movies are sort of funny, but that’s only because they’re sort of poorly made and wonderfully overacted by Charlton Heston, not because the apes were hard asses.

I guess it’s all fine and good to blame these acts of ape violence on a few bad apples, but if you dig a little deeper, it gets a bit more disturbing. According to the journal Current Biology, those funny little bastards may have a plan — an evil plan. It may not be a great evil plan necessarily, but it’s a plan nonetheless. Generally, I would assume the plan of an ape to have something to do with laughing and throwing their feces all over the place and possibly some sweet, sweet, rapid ape fornication. In reality, a certain ape was planning for an attack.

Santino, the chimp who is part of the attractions at the Furuvik Zoo near Stockholm, Sweden, quietly collected a stash of rocks before he began throwing them at zoo visitors and zookeepers. He began his gathering early in the morning and opened up with an ape rock barrage sometime around midday. Even our past president managed to avoid a couple of shoes thrown from a few yards away, so I’m sure the visitors had little trouble avoiding the airborne rocks. “Oh, that ape’s throwing rocks. We should probably move along.” You don’t exactly have to be a genius.

This is fascinating to scientists, though, because the ape appeared to get all crazy. He was able to plan. The author of the report, Mathias Osvath, said, “This implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events.” I would also guess this ability made him feel very bad about his efforts. When he saw it playing out in his head, I’m sure the ape imagined himself killing all of the visitors with the rocks, executing a daring escape and then spending the rest of his ape life living high on the hog somewhere near Miami Beach. That’s the problem with plans — they usually don’t really work all that well.

Sure, the ape had a plan; he just didn’t have very good aim. No one was seriously injured in the incident, which is good news for the tourists, probably bad news for the ape. Hell’s bells, I’m not even an ape and I could have predicted the outcome. First of all, he was throwing across a moat. It would be hard for a major leaguer to take anyone down from that kind of distance. If he was so freaking smart, he would have built himself a little ape catapult.

This ape was apparently the leader of his little ape group, and yet he tried to shoulder the entire load himself. I mean, I don’t want to give the little fella help in his plan to wipe out the population of Sweden, but there’s power in numbers. Get some of those other lazy apes to throw a couple of stones, and you might actually have yourself a full-on ape riot the next time. If nothing else, have them at least build you a raft so you can get across the moat and have an easier chance of hitting the targets.

The article was careful to point out that all chimpanzees have a different level of knowledge, so Santino may just be some sort of ape genius. In an effort to chill his shit out, the zookeepers have begun keeping him inside until noon so he can’t collect rocks to throw. I don’t know, I think I’d be giving the mean little bastard an IQ test just to see what kind of problem we may have on our hands.

Even with all that, I still really like the apes. The evidence that they can plan is maybe a little disturbing, but it’s also probably not all that surprising. They’re managed to stick around for quite awhile, so I would guess they know something about planning. The key may simply be to teach them to use this planning for good, not evil. I hate to take this particular ape’s side, but I’m sure I might throw a few rocks around if a steady stream of slack-jawed tourists were looking through my front window every damned day. They might act a little better if we’d just stop pissing them off quite so much.