Some Kind of Monkey

During my Freshman year of high school, I took a walk with some of the other kids down to a local exotic pet store. One of the guys was toying with the notion of buying a monkey, though he was certain his parents wouldn't allow it. I was a bit uneasy in that place, with squawking birds, rattling cages, and an unsettling melange of odors. My friend was particularly mesmerized by one monkey, who reached through his cage and tugged at his tie. I don't know if he ever did buy a monkey, but in the years I knew him he never did. I could see the fascination with a little, almost human creature, but I could also see the impracticality and the potential problems that a monkey owner might face, such as Ross on Friends.

In my early 20s, I took my girlfriend to The Bronx Zoo, which I hadn't visited for years. Various exhibits were of interest, particularly the dark confines in which bats and reptiles resided, but the gorilla enclosure at the center of the park kept drawing me in. That was the day I learned that certain primates will fling their own waste, though surprisingly not firsthand. Those were my lucky years, before my inevitable regression to type. “Hey, that one just threw something...what was that, a dirt bomb?” I asked naively, keeping a safe distance when I had my answer.

As with any animal, it was the young ones who were the cutest, chasing one another then hanging off the mother as she strolled nonchalantly, pausing to give a tired look around the yard every now and then. My girlfriend took notice of which animals interested me the most, and when I wasn't looking picked up a postcard which she surprised me with on my birthday a few weeks later, a portrait of a majestic gorilla that I have to this day.

As fun as they were to watch, I still couldn't see owning one as a pet. A friend and his wife own a huge mastiff whom I've gotten used to, because she's just a giant mush of wrinkles, despite the fact that she could literally bite my head off. “She's harmless,” assured my friend, once sticking his fist in her mouth as she just rolled her eyes up at him, not biting her master. It's kind of gross because with the jowls the thing is a drool factory, but she really wouldn't harm her owners or anyone who wasn't a threat to them. On the other hand, a 200-300 pound dog is great to have on your side if someone does threaten you. I was raised in a home that always had cats, and I was chased by dogs a few times as a kid, but I can understand why people would have them as pets. I even understand smaller, caged or tanked animals, from snakes to hamsters to fish. And of course, after those Suburban Auto Group Trunk Monkey ads that were popular a few years ago, I started thinking how cool it would be to have a chimp in your corner, even better than a dog. A loyal sidekick with opposable thumbs? Awesome.

This week, one story proved how owning a chimpanzee might be anything other than awesome. In Connecticut, a 200-pound chimp mauled his owner's friend and was subsequently shot and killed by police. It's a horrible story all around, and I've been hearing clips on the radio of the tearful 70-year-old woman who lost a creature she treated as her son. At one point during the attack she even stabbed him with a butcher knife to try to get him off her friend, but it wasn't enough. There's also an account of her trying to calm him down by slipping Xanax into his tea, so there is a question of common sense within this tragic tale. Possible causes being considered are anything from Lyme disease to a chemical imbalance to not recognizing the victim because she changed her hairstyle.

Now, the thing that made me take notice is when I heard the extent of the victim's injuries. Generally, when I hear the word maul, I think “very badly scratched”. The word I associate with “maul” is “tiger”. I don't think of a monkey as being a wild animal, something with teeth and claws. Most news reports don't go into detail, and on my morning commute on Thursday I heard Opie and Anthony discussing just what Travis the chimp did to this poor woman, one Charla Nash. Not only did he chew up her hands, but he literally ripped her face off. He pulled out her eyes, tore off her nose, and yanked off her lower jaw. Amazingly, and I'm still not sure if “miraculously” works as well, she survived and remains in critical condition. She's currently in a hospital in Cleveland where the nation's first face transplant took place. The fictional procedure in Face/Off is now something of a reality, as doctors took nerve endings and skin tissue from a dead woman to reconstruct the face of a live one. Nash will need to be stabilized before any kind of reconstructive procedure is considered.

200 pounds doesn't sound like a lot to me, only 15 more than what I weigh right now. But where my mass comes from Doritos, the chimp was mainly muscle, with teeth and fur. They look cute, they look like us, and they're potentially more deadly than we realize. It's not typical behavior to attack, but it's extremely sobering to learn just what kind of damage one of those things can do. It's horrid on all fronts, from the poor woman who, if she survives, will never be the same after simply trying to help her friend corral a rampant pet, to the owner, Sandra Herold, who lost her “child” and saw her friend ripped apart until unrecognizable all within a matter of minutes. I think back to that monkey playing with my friend's necktie, or those little gorillas hanging from their mother, and imagine the transformation of any animal from adorable young to killing machine. The scary thing is that this is true of any living creature, especially and including us. When the monster within the monkey is unleashed, watch out...