Travis the Chimpanzee Not to Blame for Attack on Woman
On Monday, a 15-year-old chimpanzee named Travis, who was kept as a "pet" by a woman in Connecticut, went on a rampage and mauled a visitor. Travis was stabbed multiple times, "pounded" with a shovel, and eventually shot to death.
A former "star" of Coca-Cola and Old Navy commercials and an episode of the Maury Povich Show, Travis was "raised almost like a child by this family," according to a police officer. Great—except that 200-pound chimpanzees aren't children.
Keeping any wild animal as a "pet" is inhumane and dangerous. There have been scores of incidents in which captive chimpanzees inflicted grave injuries on people. This tragedy illustrates the need for Connecticut to add primates to its ban on potentially dangerous animals—which already includes big cats, bears, and wolves—and we have asked Governor Rell to do that.
Academy Award–winning actor Anjelica Huston has spoken up in a moving public service announcement in behalf of great apes used for entertainment. Check it out below:
Thanks to companies like CareerBuilder and, more recently, Castrol Oil, whose ads show baby chimpanzees dressed up in clothes and "monkeying around" in offices and service stations, many people seem to think of chimpanzees as comical sub-human clowns. They aren't. They are wild animals who are torn away from their mothers at an obscenely young age and beaten into submission. By the time they are 8, they are big enough and strong enough to fight back, which earns them a one-way ticket to a cage in someone's basement or a concrete pit at a roadside zoo.
Neither Travis nor any other great ape belongs in show business. Who ends up happy in this story? Were those 30-second commercials really worth a lifetime of confinement in an unsuitable environment that eventually led to a woman's grave injury and Travis's death? Click here to take action on this issue.
Please, complain loudly any time you see a primate used in a movie, TV show, or advertisement.
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Travis the chimpanzee was given Xanax by its owner, a drug known to cause aggression in humans.
This all makes me wonder why that woman has a pet chimpanzee in the first place. It is a wild animal after all, and can be unpredictable no matter how trained or domesticated they are. It's tragic for everyone. Herold is already a widow and her daughter died in a car accident, now this. And her friend will be scarred for life if she lives. One of the cops said that the woman doesn't even have a face anymore.
But I don't want to just pin the blame on chimpanzees just because chimpanzees are put in the spotlight after this incident. Domesticated animals like dogs (like the pit bull attacks back a while ago) have been known to maul people from time to time. You have zoo animals mauling people (like the San Francisco tiger boy). And even humans are just as unpredictable. Enter Joe, your mellow average guy today. Nice guy, everyone thinks. Tomorrow, axe murderer.
The article has a point. Anyone see Planet of the Apes with Mark Wahlberg?
The basic fact - the only fact that needs to be considered at all in this discussion - is that chimpnazees are known to be dangerous and unpredicatble animals - not every one of them but enough that their reputation is well-deserved. This alone is sufficent to conclude that a) any non-animal professional who keeps a chimp as a pet is foolish, and b) laws banning such ownership are in the public interest.
then there's the question the morality of owning any pet, never mind a primate...The point is that you do not need to wade into that quagmire to make the case that owning a chip is against the public interest and should be banned.
Peta is an organization that is pushy, arrogant, fascist and full of kooks with oddball ideas but guess what? I agree with them on this!!! Wild animals should never be kept as pets. We have dogs and cats that have been domesticated for thousands of years and are well adapted to live with humans. That is enough.
Travis the chimp is not at fault; society is to blame. There is nothing government can do about such attacks until we finally agree to deal with the root causes such as speciesism, poverty and economic inequality. We can begin by looking into healthcare and affordable housing.
Nothing you said is the cause of the problem. Keeping wild animals is the problem. Making such a practice illegal and enforcing that law is the answer. Maybe you are one of those that blames "Society" for everything. The Chimp is a wild animal and should be living in the wild. There, isn't that simple?
If the problems I cited can cause a gang member to do a drive-by shooting, why wouldn't they be equally likely to cause a chimp to rip a face off? I just don't see that much of a difference.
The chimp is isolated from the aspects of society that give rise to Gangs and crime. Gangs are usually an offshoot of poverty and broken homes (among other things). The Chimp did not live under those conditions.
Most (if not all) chimps are born to unwed mothers. I've never come across one that had any money. And most of the gang members grow up in neighborhoods that are more prosperous than 75% of the world.
Your reply's are so absurd I don't know what to say except that Chimps don't have human intelligence and are not part of our society in any meaningful way. Any more absurd reply's by you will be ignored.
it's no joke or exageration to state PETA spokes people are a bunch of selfrighteous irrational members of our society . i think it is best to return as many like minded people of this sort to the wild where they can learn to actualize and catch up with society's civility.