So,… Uh, you wake up one morning and get a call from a friend for some help and end up with your face and hands torn off by a rogue chimpanzee…
Quoting a poster on the CNN site:
oleg16: “nothing is preventable. do you know whats gonna happen in next two hours?”
I’m pretty sure that in the next two hours I’m not going to end up in some ‘planet of the apes’ scenario in a battle for my life. Yet it happened.
The whole thing is a major wtf!? Imagine being the police arriving on scene.
I’m really not sure if I should laugh due to the ridiculous nature of what happened, or be pissed that the cops didn’t shoot the owner of the chimpanzee for leaving keys around for her monkey to use to escape with (let alone owning a chimpanzee). Where was the monkey going? To get some booze? Fudgee O’s? Out of cigarettes? Going to use the car to pick up hookers? Oh, man! Now I am starting to laugh. I really am going to hell.
The first time I encountered the idea of a chimp ripping off someone’s face, was on an old “Ren & Stimpy” cartoon. I thought it was a ridiculous farce that could never occur in real life.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that they really can rip off your face :eek:
After hearing this story I’m inclined to think that all pet chimps, plus the idiots that own them, should be immediately euthanized.
I heard about this on some morbid Animal Planet television show about people and their exotic pets and what happens when those exotic pets attack. At least, I think I did. I hope that there haven’t been two identical chimpanzee attacks. Anyway, the show had footage taken from a police helicopter and the chimp’s owner’s frantic phone call to the police. It’s one of the more horrific things I’ve seen on television. The phone call is harrowing. The woman is shrieking, begging the dispatcher to send police. She thinks that her friend has been killed. Eventually, she sort of gives up hope, and starts moaning into the phone, “Oh, he’s eating her face. He’s eating her face now.” The chimpanzee had momentarily stopped his assault to squat on the victim’s chest and eat the strips of flesh that he had torn off.
When the show interviewed the chimp’s owner, all she could do was lament that the police had needed to shoot the chimp and kill him. I don’t imagine that she’s still friends with the woman from the article.
Call me a horrible person…but when I clicked that link, and saw the picture of the woman sitting there, I said to myself “You know, they didn’t do a half-bad job. She almost looks like a normal person!” Then I realized that was the before-the-chimp-attack picture…
Yep, that was the same attack. The owner of the chimp died of an aortic aneurysm last year. Charla Nash, the victim, seemed about as forgiving as one might be in an interview about her.
Actually there have been two very similar attacks in recent years. This is a very interesting article about the man who also lost his face to a chimp attack. (Warning: contains photos of the man’s disfigured face.)
Sandra Herold, the owner of Travis, was a strange and sick woman. Among other things, she bathed and slept with the chimp, fed him human food, wine and Xanax. In my view she basically set up the conditions for him to do something terrible eventually, and through her own ignorance and foolishness misled her friend into thinking that the two of them could control him. She really was responsible for what happened; the state of Connecticut let her off the hook.
Unfortunatley, we can’t put humans on display in zoo’s yet. It would be a good idea, though. An exhibit of ‘Stupid People’ would be educational for everyone.
On second reading, I assume you were referring to the monkey.
Yep. I suppose maybe something about actually being faced with death may give one a new will to live, but as I sit here today, I think I’d rather die. I admit that the notion of wearing a dead person’s face and hands makes me profoundly uncomfortable, to the point where I don’t think I could do it. I don’t mean to imply that the subject of this story should agree – I wish her only the best.
This story makes me sad, because of the horrible outcome for the woman, but also because it seems so fucking stupid. What kind of nutjob neglects to understand that a chimpanzee is a wild primate, strong as shit, and given that you’re giving him Xanax and wine, liable to go off the deep end?
My general rule about animals is that if they can beat or maul my ass and don’t have thousands of years of domesticity in their DNA, I stay the fuck away from them.
I wouldn’t even visit a friend with a big dog. Sounds like the victim was trying to do a solid for a friend and ended up blinded with her face and hands ripped off. Yeah, I don’t think I’d want to come back from that one either.
Actually, I just read the Wikipedia page and it shows how beguiled people can become by smart primates. The chimp sounded very “human” and clever. I can see someone “thinking” that he was tame. And the owner tried to stop the attack by stabbing the chimp. Shitty story all the way around.
People like to say that Michael Jackson was nuts, but he knew that Bubbles couldn’t hang around Neverland forever. He sent him to a primate center.
I’ve been familiar with this story (the mauling, a really awful interview with the chimp’s owner, the aftermath) for a while now.
I gotta say - the only conclusion I can draw is that people who keep chimpanzees as pets should be fined and/or jailed. Any “tame” chimps must be re-acclimitized to the wild and released, or humanely put down.
These things aren’t pets. They’re intelligent wild animals with aggressive tendencies. Fuck every person who thought they’d be good living among humans.
I don’t know that the Wiki piece fully illuminates the way Herold developed her relationship with Travis after the deaths of her daughter and husband, as she increasingly related to the chimp as an intimate family member himself. For five years, just the two of them in her house in Stamford, this was her closest and most constant relationship. She referred to Travis as her son; “he couldn’t have been more my son than if I’d given birth to him.”
She told people that primatologists didn’t know chimpanzees as she did, because they didn’t share meals and baths and beds with them. Less than four months before the attack, Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection biologist Elaine Hinsch had called Travis “an accident waiting to happen.”
Herold apparently tried to manage, on her own, Travis’ less-compliant behavior some days with the Xanax. She may have gotten this idea from a veterinarian, but there was no prescription produced, and she gave conflicting stories about it to police after the attack.
Yes, chimps are pretty smart as animals go, and Travis certainly showed a lot of human-like behaviors–but he was led into that unnatural life. Herold wasn’t just beguiled by what he was–she made him into something that he really wasn’t. It had to come apart someday. Hinsch was exactly right.
Charla Nash trusted this delusion of Herold’s emotional needs and presumption. Nash, and Travis himself, paid the price for what Herold did. I think she should have gone to prison for animal cruelty and reckless endangerment, and some hard questions should have been asked around Connecticut state government about why they didn’t take action before the rampage.
People just don’t get it. My coworkers still think chimps are cute. I have seen the pictures and read the stories of what they can do to people, and I have a hard time disconnecting that with the guys you see in zoos. I hate chimps, and I probably wouldn’t have a problem with humanely putting down chimps that have been kept as pets, if there were no zoo takers.
It’s like the Chris Rock routine on Sigfried and Roy - that tiger didn’t go crazy, that tiger went tiger! You have a chimp for a pet, you will eventually have a crazy mad thing and we are lucky if it only rips YOUR face off and not a friend’s who had nothing to do with it. :eek: :sad:
