Decidedly Grim

It’s just awful to listen to. But not half as awful as it must have been to actually be there.
And this is why it’s not a good idea to make a pet out of a monkey. They are just humanoid enough to lull somebody into thinking they are furry humans, but they are twice as strong as a human of the same size, and deep down under the human facade is a wild animal who isn’t going to react to things the way a human would and does not have a human concept of right and wrong.
I also think it is more than a little creepy how the lady who owned this chimp considered him her son. She is obviously a kind and loving person, but she’s missing a few of her more important marbles.
So, don’t make a human out of a monkey, or he will make a monkey out of you.

Okay then, don’t go ape over apes! lol
My grandfather had a pet monkey (an actual monkey, I guess, it was pretty small) back when my mother was little. His name was Amos. (The monkey, not my grandfather; my grandfather’s name was Herman) This was back when there really weren’t any laws against keeping a monkey as a pet.
From what I ahve heard, Amos was pretty nice, as monkeys go, but messy and smelly. He’d go to work every day with my grandfather to the gas station, and he’d wear a little harness so he could climb around but not get lost. But eventually he did bite somebody on the hand, pretty deep bite, and I think he was eventually given away.

In his book “Dead Men Do Tell Tales” Dr. Maples said, no primate makes a good pet; that includes humans. After almost losing a limb from a baboon bite he says, “I hold no grudge. In his position, I would have tried to kill me too.” As horrific as what happened to this woman is, I think the real tragedy was what happened to the chimp. He did nothing wrong except have the misfortune of being kept by an ignorant human. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize a lot of things (cars, computers, cadavers) but this is a great example of why that can be dangerous. I think we do non-human animals a great disservice (and disrespect) by humanizing them.

Reminds me of Chuck Palahniuck’s book “Invisible Monsters” where a fashion model loses her bottom jaw in an accident – hilarious! Highly recommended

OH lord. There’s some things that really are worse than death. She can’t see, she can’t talk, maybe can’t smell? and her hands are torn up too so that’s going to make things even harder for her than they already are.
Apparently the chimp had bitten another person back in 1996, and had gotten loose and was fooling around in the streets a few years back, and his owner had been warned about him.
Did she honestly think that she could really control this animal if he really decided to let himself go? (Yes, she probably did have herself convinced.)
According to something I heard on the radio, she bathed with the chimp.
That is just gross, on so many levels.

I’ve also read that the Chimp was suffering from Lyme disease. I feel bad for the mauled woman and the quality of life she’ll have if she successfully recovers form her injuries, but I feel worse for the now dead Chimp. Even if his “owner” did dote on him like a son, that’s no life for a Chimpanzee.

Was she even feeding him right? All the news says he ate steak and lobster and ice cream. Well, chimps in the wild or in zoos sure don’t eat that stuff. He even drank wine from a wineglass. How smart is it to let a chimp who’s already shown he has aggressive tendencies drink alcohol?
She was self-medicating him too, with Xanax in his tea. So she knew he had problems.

The woman who was mauled was not the owner of the chimpanzee. This does not make a huge difference– she was a friend, not an unsuspecting delivery driver– but it does mean you can’t simply say it served her right.

In most states there are _no_ restrictions on what animals can be kept as pets or who can buy them. You can bring home a tiger cub, an alligator, or a snake that grows to 30ft and shut it up in a bedroom or let it loose in your back yard. A pet store can put out a litter of some cute small-and-furry that no veterinarian in a 500-mile radius has ever heard of, and sell one to the next ten-year-old who walks in.

Louise, I know the lady who was mauled was not the owner of the chimp. And I don’t think ANYBODY was implying that Ms. Nash is in any way deserving of what happened to her. If we are implying anything at all, it’s probably that things have been leading up to this final incident for years and that the onwer, Mrs. Herold, should never have let things get that far. The chimp should have been confiscated (or more likely killed, since humanized as he was he could never have adjusted to living with other chimps) after the first biting incident, and certainly should have been after his escape a few years ago.

I was lucky enough to visit the Fauna Foundation near Montreal and I will never see chimps the same way ever again. I had no idea how big chimps get or how strong they are. Like most people I thought the ones on TV or in movies were fully grown and cute and sweet and lovable. The sad fact is that they are juveniles and once they start to get big they are sold off to zoos or, worst of all, to labs.

If you want to read a reader’s feedback , I rate this article for four from five. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn google to find the missed pieces. Thank you, anyway!