I’ll never forget the sound of my dad laughing to the point of tears as my family sat watching a nature show on television. Filmmakers had captured the drama of a female chimpanzee giving birth in a zoo, and after a shot of the new mother cradling her baby in a state of delirious wonder, they cut to the chimp father, seated in a far corner of their enclosure, back turned on his family, playing with his feet. The narrator cut him no slack when he still hadn’t acknowledged his newborn two days later, and instead of a Kodak moment, we viewers were confronted with footage of a newly minted dad too busy trying to stick ping pong balls in his ears to bother with a major life change.

Audrey Coleman and Ray Coleman visit the KU Natural History Museum when Ray was 6 months old.

Pretty soon all the humans were laughing, but my mom, sister and I were most amused by my dad’s reaction. We figured he saw himself in the chimp, who shared 98 percent of his DNA, but whose nature shamelessly revealed the reluctance of a new father. I didn’t really get the joke, though, until the night my son was born. After a day I can only describe as long and difficult (not to mention my wife’s exponentially more trying day), I was ready to go home, get some sleep, and get back to my normal life. When I awoke instead at 4 a.m. in the hospital with a crick in my neck, and my wife saying she needed some sleep and would I mind taking the baby for a while, I must confess to chimpy thoughts. No one in that room was laughing (in fact, my son was really getting the hang of crying just then), but in my mind I heard a familiar chuckle echo down the years, that of my dad, whose shortcomings I had pledged so self-righteously to correct as soon as I became a father myself. Here in my first hours on the job I felt like I had arrived on a foreign doorstep after a long and bumpy ride, and could hardly bring myself to open the door and go in.

I kept thinking about my chimp counterpart around that time, but couldn’t remember how it turned out for him, so out of curiosity I checked out a great book from the library, Jeffrey Moussaief Masson’s “The Emperor’s Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood” (Atria, 1999). Masson, a psychologist and student of animal behavior, examines fatherhood across the animal world and provides examples of what we humans would consider the best (wolves, seahorses, emperor penguins) and worst (lions, elephants, bears) animal dads. Sad to say, there was no redemption here for King Louie; Masson finds the typical male chimp’s indifference to his offspring too boring to explore. But I discovered a host of other great animal fathers to admire: A beaver observed escorting his two kits on an arduous journey to a new lodge, a tamarin monkey caught on film assisting in the birth of his own baby, wolf and prairie dog dads whose involvement rivals the most engaged of human fathers.

If we’re giving out World’s Greatest Dad T-shirts to wild animals, though, the great-winged petrel may be the most deserving. This poor sap’s chick, which hatches at around 3 ounces, increases its weight a hundredfold in a matter of months, until it has grown into a “furry bowling ball” of 80 pounds, three times the size of its pop. Then it shrinks. Contemplating a similar human scenario, I’m not sure what alarms me more: the thought of an Incredible Shrinking Toddler, or pushing a 600 pound baby in a stroller up the Hill.

This example reminds us how absurd it is to judge animals by human standards, and the best lesson of Masson’s book may be the sheer diversity of the parenting experience across the animal kingdom. Animal dads simply do what they do: Emperor penguins sit on their eggs, chimps could care less. But even within species, Masson urges us to remember, lives are led by individuals whose behavior can vary widely. Case in point: A few months ago I stumbled across a DVD at the library about another chimp dad. While it may be atypical, Disneynature’s Chimpanzee documents the story of Oscar, a baby chimp left to die after his mother is killed, until the alpha male of his group personally takes over his care. I wish my dad were here to see our old furry friend redeemed.

Human fathers, Masson writes, show a wider range of behavior — from abandonment to co-sleeping — than any other species. We like to think an abundance of choices, not instinct, gives rise to this diversity, but as time passes I see all I do as a dad rooted in a single choice, the same I faced the night my son was born, and again each day (and night) for the past four years: Do I go through that door or not? I don’t always feel like turning the knob. Once inside, I often don’t know what to do, and botch the job at times. What leads us to it, and what we face in there differs for each person, but all human parents enter by the same door. In the end maybe it’s also absurd to judge our own species, when no one really knows what they are doing, and the best anyone can do is try, and, when that doesn’t work, keep on trying.

Dan Coleman is secretary on the board of Dads of Douglas County. He is a part-time stay at home dad with a 1-year old and 3-year old, but in his other life he is a librarian at Lawrence Public Library, where he selects children’s and parenting books for the Children’s Room.