Serious Monkey Business

So, unless you’ve been living under a frikkin’ rock this week, you’ve heard the truly messed up story of the poor woman who was mauled by her friend’s pet chimpanzee and how the crazed beast was shot dead by police after a frantic 911 call.

While it is horrifying that the animal went berserk and pretty much ate the hands and face off of 55-year old Charla Nash, I really gotta say that someone should have smacked owner Sandra Herold with a frozen codfish a long time ago for keeping a wild animal as a pet.

Look, I could really give a shit less that she raised 15-year old Travis the Chimp from infancy. Despite sharing 98% of our DNA, a chimp is not a child. That remaining 2% of the DNA is the part that swings from trees, throws its own shit at passers-by, and chronically masturbates all day. When humans do that, we lock them away in asylums. When apes do it, we think it’s cute. At least until they snap and eat our friends.

A veteran of TV commercials, Travis was the constant companion of a lonely suburban Connecticut widow who fed him steak, lobster and ice cream. He could eat at the table, drink wine from a stemmed glass, use the toilet, and dress and bathe himself.
He brushed his teeth with a Water Pik, logged on to a computer to look at photos and channel-surfed television with the remote control.

Y’know, chimps in the wild don’t get to do things like this. They wake up, eat a ‘nanner, spank the human (only humans spank the monkey), swing from a tree, and throw crap at each other…then repeat as necessary. Perhaps the poor boy’s instincts were just getting a tad mis-wired from being treated like a pet and not like a wild animal.

Siberian tigers don’t normally dance or jump through hoops of fire, either. Just ask Siegfried & Roy. Of course, after Montecore the Tiger ate half of Roy’s head onstage, all Roy could say was “Don’t shoot the cat.”. Yeah, Kitty was just doing what kitties do, especially when the kitty is a 400-pound TIGER. Suuure, the nice kitty was trying to protect you, Roy....

There’s conflicting reports as to whether Travis was on Xanax, too. Great, a chimp with anxiety problems, all drugged up on Xanax, and also allegedly suffering from Lyme Disease.

Maybe he needed a piece of tail. Maybe he’d been surfing Internet porn when no one was looking. Maybe he caught that marathon of the Planet of the Apes flicks on cable and decided that the Revolution would be televized. He saw Charlton Heston ranting about damned dirty apes, and he just went off.

Or… maybe he was a wild freakin’ animal and shouldn’t have been wearing Pampers, sitting in a freakin’ Barcalounger with a cold can of Coke, watching the Jerry Springer show?

You want a pet? Get a dog. But don’t get a hybrid wolf mix. You want a fish? Don’t get a pirhana. A bird? Fine, but let’s not get an ostrich. Get a kitty, but not a tiger or lion or liger or saber-toothed velocikitty. Everything looks cute till it tries to EAT YOU.


See what I mean?