The Social Implications of Bigfoot's Existence

I wrote a past fictional post about what it might go down like when Bigfoot is found. It's something worth contemplating.

In writing a SciFi book about the social implications of talking to the dead, I wondered to myself about the Patterson-Gimlin film. Whether it's real or not, it does make us have to face the reality that if it were real, that would mean we have a creature out there waiting to be discovered, named, categorized.

How would we go about such a task?

The first step would likely be to tranquilize and transport him where we could get blood and hair samples, study him a bit, and then tag and release him into the wild again to hopefully meet up with his social grouping.

Not only would CNN and other news outlets be carrying this ongoing scientific find, but others would want to find BF for themselves. Laws would have to quickly be passed to make him an endangered species, but they wouldn't really be able to do that until they released him again and found out what sort of breeding population he's a part of.

So, for a time, he would be vulnerable to us and to crazy hunters who want publicity and fame. His DNA would provide some insights into just where on the tree of man this upright creature resides, but it will not answer for us that age old question:

What makes us human?

We could divide ourselves from apes because we exclusively walked erect. But, now another creature proves to be bipedal for quite some time on the time line beside man.

So, perhaps we see observe he seems to be trainable or has a conscious awareness as man does. After all, this huge creature has kept himself well hidden from us. That couldn't have been easy all of these centuries. Perhaps he is intelligent enough to know to hide, but not so intelligent that he has technology. Still, even apes use crude tools and one thing we know about man is that the moment he became upright, he had freed his hands to build tools to help make his job easier. He could not walk and carry a weapon or tool for the collecting of food or even for warring. When you are dexterous, your tool box grows rapidly. If this upright creature has been upright a long time, he must have an arsenal of tools he's designed along the way. Those tools should be the tell-tale signs that lead us to where BF is living and breeding, eating and sleeping.

We need to take him out of the category of "dumb ape" because he can hide from us and because he has been upright for many millennium which means his hands have been his tools and extension of those tool-like hands would be the obvious progression, in designing sharp things to kill and saw, heavy rocks to break open up trees for honey and termites.

This kind of investigation would involve keeping a Bigfoot and studying his habits. Would he do like apes and figure out which button to press to get the peanuts? Would this be too much like the scenes with Charlton Heston in "Planet of the Apes" when they lock him in the cage with the primitive human? Would we lock BF in a cage with a gorilla or orangutan?

Until we found another BF, we could never really study their use of language and how they might handle tools that we give them to work with. We would have to have more than one to know just how intelligent they are because they certainly could be vocal with us but unintelligible. If he were with another BF, would they "speak?" Would they utilize sticks and tools we give them to gather their own food in their caged environment? What would this tell us of their intelligence level?

Would we put them in zoos? Would we autopsy one? Would we release them into the wild and then go and sit amongst them like Jane Goodall and study their habits? Would the area of his "tribe" be considered a protected park? Would folks pile the kids up in cars to go to Sasquatch Canyon and camp and hope to see BF inside the chain linked area where they could take pictures of the elusive hermit like something out of "Jurassic Park"?

None of this is even considering what rights Bigfoot would have. Rights as an animal or as a human?

Nearly any scenario is a grave one. Can we as ego-driven human beings simply believe in something without "proving" its existence? Can we just back off and say "he's there," without pulling him out of his homeland to be "right." Perhaps we could relegate him once again to the murky categories of Loch Ness Monster and Mothman and enjoy just contemplating "what if?"