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Apes With Guns, Machetes and Superior Minds Are Scaring The Hell Out Of Me Today

As some of "you may remember":http://motherboard.tv/2011/6/28/if-apes-are-getting-smarter-what-s-in-store-for-us, I was invited to LA last month for a sneak peek at behind the scenes development for Twenty First Century Fox's new _Planet of the Apes...

As some of you may remember, I was invited to LA last month for a sneak peek at behind the scenes development for Twenty First Century Fox’s new Planet of the Apes reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It was a wild ride, to say the least and I learned a lot about human-animal experimentation. In fact, the presentations by director, Rupert Wyatt and folks from the Peter Jackson-owned company of visual magicians, WETA Digital were often so convincing, that I found myself wondering whether or not I was being experimented on myself.

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We’ll never know for sure, but I’ll hand it to everyone involved in the production of the new Apes, who’ve dug up a collection of videos featuring primates ostensibly getting smarter for the purpose of promoting the film. At first I wasn’t expecting to see anything better than a monkey chugging orange soda or riding a dog; or smoking cigarettes, which my friend told me is a huge issue in India.

To my surprise, the animal experts in Fox’s publicity team found the following, and I can promise that each is pretty goddamn frightening. Here they are, in no particular order.

Great job, apes.

An ape beats a human in a memory test
Idi Amin's trained chimpanzees were taught to kill with machetes in the 1970’s
An ape shooting an AK-47