The story of Travis, the chimpanzee, reminds me of a zoo where a visitor had climbed in with the polar bears, and got mauled. One bear was shot. A rather unfair ending, in my opinion.
Now there is another sad story surrounding a chimpanzee. Travis, a young adult male kept as a pet in Stamford, Connecticut, attacked a woman on February 16th, 2009, visiting the owner, and ends up shot and killed by the police. Under the circumstances, you can't blame the police, but this doesn't make the case less tragic.
Without going into the details of how well the chimp knew the human visitor, or what the effect may have been of the Xanax in his tea, we should consider that this was a 15-year-old male. This is precisely the age at which males begin to domineer females of their species and challenge more established males. If you have ever seen male chimps work on their status it is obvious that they are real risk-takers, employing their considerable strength to move up and not caring one bit about the injuries they may incur. Travis was a time bomb waiting to be set off.
Adult chimpanzees are totally beyond unarmed human control, and have been known to kill people. At a sanctuary in Sierra Leone, in 2006, a group of chimpanzees turned on a local driver and Western visitors, killing the driver and seriously injuring the others. Fatal attacks on humans have occurred at zoos as well.
Chimpanzees are smaller than us. On all fours, they only reach to our knees, so people often misjudge their force. You can see how muscular they are when they effortlessly scale a branchless tree. It's a feat of strength no human can replicate. The arm pulling strength of the male chimpanzee has been measured at five times that of athletic young men, and since apes fight with four "hands," they are impossible to beat. This is so even if they're prevented from biting as was done by a man I once met, who traveled carnivals with a chimp. Every macho guy was ready to wrestle the ape, thinking it would be a piece of cake. But even hulks the size of a pro-wrestler found it impossible to control the man's partner.
What makes apes so strong? Muscle density may be part of the answer, which would also explain why apes can't swim: they lack buoyancy. The pound-for-pound output power of ape muscles is estimated to be twice that of our own species.
It is well known to those who work with chimps in captivity that if one of them is able to get a hold of a human arm or ankle through the bars, there is no way to free yourself by force. The ape has to voluntarily release. A chimp can move its entire body up hanging by a single finger: don't try this at home!
It's tragic that perhaps the attacked woman will lose her life, or at least her face, not to mention the price that Travis paid for the incident. All as a result of lax laws that let people keep undomesticated animals at home. A chimp is no pet and will never make a good pet however well treated. People are lured into keeping them because they are cute when they are young, but this is naïve and irresponsible.
But there are other reasons not to keep nonhuman primates as pets. Chimps may be particularly dangerous, but even smaller monkeys are not made for a life in a human home. Hundreds of accidents happen every year in which monkeys bite owners or visitors, which is why many of them end up without teeth. Is this a way to treat our fellow primates: emasculated and detoothed?
This is why we need organizations, such as ChimpHaven, which take in animals like this, remove them from human homes, and release them onto large islands where they live a more natural social life. No diapers are needed here. They live in a green setting in which they mingle with fellow apes, doing no harm to humans and humans doing no harm to them.
-- Frans de Waal
She decided to get rid of her chimp.
It seems obvious to me that the woman who kept the chimp as a pet was doing so more for her own selfish desires than for any concern for Travis' welfare. If she really cared about him, she should have brought him, as you said, to a place like Chimphaven, or someplace with a reasonable approximation of natural chimp habitat.
I can understand the wish to nurture a baby animal. But the combination of misguided mommy instinct combined with sheer stupidity in this case is massive. It's a shame that, as always, an innocent human is horribly injured and the animal winds up dead.
Wild animals need wild habitat. They also need to be respected on their own terms.
How many generations of human domestication have we had? All docile and wimpy and submissive now right?
Let's try to get back to common sense and stick close to it. Leave wild animals in the wild, and never as pets- thats abuse of the animal and any of its victims.
You have hit the nail on the head in this article.
What are the reasons to keep human primates as pets?
Treating an animal like a cute, mini/alter person is always a mistake. Dressing up a dog to look like a baby may not get you killed (maybe it should get you seriously slapped, however) - but dressing up an animal like a chimp just proves idiocy.
People keep big cats, alligators, bears and other dangerous animals as "pets". Doing so poses a hazard to the community, no matter how "domesticated" the owner says they are. Accidents happen. They even turn on their owners.
There are plenty of dogs and cats in shelters dieing for a forever home. If these people can't be satisfied with a dog or cat, maybe they're not fit to have any pets at all.