Fluffy the Puma
A little soapbox moment here, folks. I imagine by now we’ve all heard about the woman in Stamford, CT, who was mauled by her neighbor’s 200 lb. chimp (with whom some news reports made a point of saying she was great friends). These stories, unfortunately, happen pretty regularly, and they always seem to run the same way. Some ordinary person decides to get an exotic pet. Said pet is raised in the bosom of the family, beloved by all. (In this case, the chimp, Travis, even starred in TV commercials.) And then one day, usually when the animal is an adult, something goes horrifyingly wrong and some member has to go in to the ER for tiger mauling triage. The news stories always make a point of mentioning how well-behaved, how well-mannered, what a joker the animal was! Particularly if it’s a chimp involved. There’s always a temptation to make it a Lifetime movie about the beloved pet and TV star gone tragically bad.
Sorry. This is not Old Yeller, people. A chimp does not have to have rabies or some inexplicable, tragic personality flaw or childhood trauma to seriously hurt someone in a bad moment. It does not have to have gone wrong. It just has to be a chimp. Acting as if chimps should be human, as if we should be able to make them into mentally deficient children by raising them that way is just asking for trouble. Wild animals are WILD ANIMALS, regardless of how they’ve been raised. They may love you to the extent that they’re capable of it, they may have excellent manners at the dinner table, but they still have buried instincts that can potentially be extremely dangerous. Raising a tiger cub in your house and treating it like a beloved pet is never going to make it into a dog.
A special brand of this crazy seems to apply to chimps. After all, think how smart they are! And how much like us they are! Here’s the thing. Chimpanzees are not inherently nice animals. This is a well known fact. Chimps that were perfectly docile in their youth can become dangerously aggressive as adults, and even chimps that are generally pleasant, easy-going adults can behave unpredictably given the right triggers. Chimps are meat eaters. They sometimes practice cannibalism. Violence is a normal part of life for chimps in the wild. They are also extremely strong, and capable of mauling a human being in no time at all if panicked or angry or otherwise under stress.
Now, I’m not saying that every person who keeps a wild animal or even a large wild animal is going to have it end in tears. It’s just like keeping a loaded gun out in your house. You could well have it in the house for years and never have a problem with it. But that doesn’t change the fact that the gun is loaded and that under the right (or wrong) circumstances, terrible things could happen without much warning.
People regularly underestimate the difference between a wild animal that’s been raised in a domestic setting and a genuinely domesticated animal like a dog. You may have seen the recent studies indicating that dogs show signs of being able to interpret human facial expressions as an indicator of emotion in a way that has not been seen in any other animal, including chimps, despite the fact that chimps share approximately 94% of our DNA. If you smile at a dog, a dog may interpret that as happiness and wag its tail at you, despite the fact that the dog’s own way of expressing itself is nothing like yours. If you smile at a chimp, on the other hand, the chimp’s instincts probably tell it you are baring your teeth, a potentially threatening move on your part. There is no way to train this kind of basic difference out of an animal whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents led a natural life fighting for survival. Even at the most conservative estimates, people have been working on domesticating dogs for thousands of years. THIS is why they are so reliable, so good with people. It isn’t something you can replace with any amount of affection in upbringing.
Chimps do not react the same way people do regardless of how they’ve been raised. And frankly, the burden shouldn’t be on them to behave like a human child because they were raised like one. It’s always the animal who gets shot when someone gets hurt, but in a way, that’s a tragedy of its own when the animal was only doing what instinct told it to. They shouldn’t be put in those kinds of situations. Someone expert in primate behavior can probably avoid giving a chimp the wrong cues, although I suspect that most of those experts would not advocate living in close proximity with a chimp day in and day out. But your poor neighbor? She’s not an expert in animal behavior. Of course not. Nor should she have to be.
In summary, if you want a dog, people, buy a damn dog. And give wild animals the respect of recognizing what they are.
So GMA was airing an interview with the woman who owned the chimp this morning. The money quote was something along the lines of “I clothes him, I cooked for him, I slept with him.”
Umm, sublimation much? It’s an animal people, NOT A HUMAN.
It reminds me of that story about the South African family who gave their pet hippo a massage every night before tucking her into bed with a pink blanket (http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=24903). Aside from the fact that it makes me wonder if I’m running my life the wrong way if a hippo is getting a nightly massage and I’m not, it does seem like a bit much. I wonder if there’s been an increase or decrease in exotic pet ownership since the advent of all these “Growing Up Snow Leopard” type shows.
Bingo. And, not to mention the fact that this was a young male chimp. If I remember my chimp facts right, they live about as long as we do. This puts that chimp at a point in its’ life (16yrs.) where all kinds of hormones are raging, which in a male chimp means, ‘I must dominate my group.’ He may love his Daddy and his brother very much, but that won’t stop him from killing said Daddy or brother in order take over the leadership position of the group. Basic chimp behavior. Duh!!
[...] up on my post of last week on the subject of the insanity of wild animal ownership, the New York Times had an interesting article today on the subject of primate ownership, [...]