You can listen to the 911 call here. I link to this because it’s a really shocking call.
In fourteen states it is, including this one:
Many other states require at least a special permit for many of those or a partial ban such as Michigan.
If he’s so smart, how come he’s he dead?
ETA: I like chicken fajitas.
There was a snippet of an interview with the owner on NPR this morning. She was distraught, and said something like “he was my life. I cooked for him, I shopped for him, I slept with him. And now he’s gone.”
Lady…you what?
No!
Thats like fiber to my system and I have a really good aim and big cup like hands 
Just. Walk. Away.
Also says she called the ape her “son.” This woman was a total idiot and I’m very sorry for the hell her friend is going to go through.
Pray for [del]Mojo[/del] Travis.
Hot Monkey love?
Back when I was in college, one of my professors was a behavioral psychologist named Herb Terrace. He trained a baby chimp to use language. The simian was given the name “Nim Chimpsky,” in humorous tribute to linguist Noam Chomsky.
Nim was raised very much as a human baby would have been. He learned to dress himself and feed himself much as a little boy would have. And he evetnually developed an extensive vocabulary.
Ultimately, Terrace concluded (not everyone agreed with him, but I did) that Nim didn’t REALLY learn language- that he was just smart enough to figure out that certain combinations of symbols would get him a piece of fruit.
But Nim had a dismal future ahead of him, after he reached adolescence. Adult chimps aren’t cute- they’re aggressive and dangerous. And having grown up with people, he had NO survival skills at all. He simply wouldn’t have known what to do if he were set free in an African rain forest.
His miserable life was documented in a book:
I don’t think pythons are as dangerous as those other animals, but still I agree; I don’t know why an adult would want a python as a “pet.” As a boy I had a kingsnake, but I can’t imagine having one now.
Watching the ckip from Fox News I wanted to smack the news guy. The Primate expert said twice that basically chimpanzees can’t be domesticated, that they are wild animals and should not be kept as pets. Then he asks about the fact that in the wild Travis may have been injured or killed byu another wild animal.
Dude…in a residential neighborhood Travis can harm other human beings. Didn’‘t you hear what the lady just said? This isbn’t some great mystery. Travis was an ape! He could rip your arm off and beat you with you with it. I’m betting he didn’t even like living in the house and considered it imprisonment of some kind. They let him drink freakin’ wine! I wouldn’t give alcohol to a superstrong human like animal…jeez.
The problem’s when they’re too big to keep as a pet any longer.
Although I do feel bad for the victim, I have to admit I got a little bit of schadenfreude from that, listening to the sheer horror in her voice as she witnessed the carnage wrought by her incredibly idiotic decision to get a chimp as a pet.
Sadly she will probably never make the connection that her friend’s trauma was, in fact, the direct result of her own terrible decision. She’ll probably write it off as a fluke incident, a senseless tragedy that no one could have predicted.
Agree with this. You would not believe the conditions that some of these “pets” are kept in. Stories like this are not uncommon.
That was one clever thing about the Burton version of Planet of the Apes – the aggressive ape general was a chimp – in all previous versions the ape armies were all-gorilla (probably from a conventional wisdom that soldiers/police be big dumb brutes), but this time you wanted the character to be nasty and ill-tempered and a chimp was appropriate.
I think this sums up my unease with people who think of their animals as ‘little people’. They’re not.
We’ve all know people who refer to their dogs as their ‘kids’ or their ‘furbabies’. They blind themselves to their charges’ animal traits by thinking of them as people. But people and dogs have been developing together for a long time, and we know to some degree how to train each other. Even then, there are often problems.
In the case of Travis the chimp, a woman was misled by the more human-like shape of the chimp into anthropomorphizing it even more, and was totally oblivious to its animal signals. Until something went wrong.
I saw something about it on Good morning America? this morning.
The chimp was one meds, apparently irritated about not going for a drive/ride, and then the female family friend showed up with a new really short haircut that Mr Bananna really didnt like.
Unless he went apeshit the moment she walked in the door, the owner showed a real lack of judgement that day.
And as scary as the 911 call was after the fact, I hate to say if I had been maning the phone I would have probably been laughing. Because I would have thought at first it was a well played prank.
On Valentine’s night, there were two things in the house going eee! eee! eee!
Oook.
My God, you’re right! I never even thought about that!
BONUS FILLER:
I hate every ape I see
From chimpan-A to chimpan-z …
Did anyone else notice in the news stories that the lady owning the chimp was 70?
She was probably very lucky that it didn’t go after her.