Chimp Attack-Whose Fault Is It?

The story in the news about the pet chimp that attacked a woman got me to thinking. Thinking about how humans do unnatural things and then wonder why bad things happen. I know, who am I to say what is unnatural? I color my hair to get rid of the gray and I wear make-up, both unnatural. But I am talking about behavior more than anything. We behave in ways that are confounding at times. We treat wild animals like our kids or spouses and expect that will make them act like any other part of our family. You can't put a diaper on a chimp, sleep with it, bathe with it, let it brush your hair and then give it human medicine like Xanax and whatever that woman's pet was given for Lyme Disease and assume the animal will somehow "turn" human and behave accordingly. For gosh sakes, humans don't even always act like decent, civilized beings under strange circumstances, why would someone expect a chimpanzee to?

I am an animal lover, I understand the difficulty of separating out human emotion from animal love and care. But when we give human status to non-human animals we begin to cross the line of sanity. Not to say that chimps aren't capable of emotion and thinking, clearly they are. Not to say that other animals aren't intelligent and can learn, clearly they can. But having emotion and thinking and learning abilities doesn't make something human, only Homo sapiens' unique 46 chromosome combination does. And we all know that even humans don't always act human or is it humane? Humans, whether wired wrong, raised wrong, or some combination of, are capable of extreme violence and aggression when provoked (and sometimes when not). Wild animals are even more apt to react at a more base, primal level. I feel sorry for the chimp and the poor woman that got attacked. I feel less sorry for the owner of the chimp (I saw today that she said she wouldn't have done anything differently). Even though she made the mistake of trying to humanize a non-human animal and still seemingly won't admit it was a mistake, I am sure she is at least very sorry that her friend got hurt so badly.

A lesson to remember though. Animals are an important part of our World, but they have a PLACE. A NATURAL PLACE where they belong. That is what we should be putting our efforts into; making sure there is a place for both humans and animals to live naturally, and not get the two so confused that we bring wild animals into our homes and hope for safe integration. We have wild animals here at Tanglewood (injured or imprinted "nonreleasables") that we use as ambassadors to educate people. We use our teaching as an opportunity to tell children never to take a wild animal out of its home. And although we have given many of our animals names (to my chagrin actually), we don't ever forget they are wild and that our job is to take care of them, but remember where they came from and treat them accordingly.