By JOYCE WADLER
View the source for photos and more: The New York Times
LIKE many longtime couples, Carlie and Bob, independent animal rescue workers in upstate New York who have been together 21 years, have a difference of opinion about one big issue in their relationship. In their case, it is about a 7-year-old Hamadryas baboon named Higgins, who spends a good part of most evenings watching HDTV in his heated monkey house, often holding hands with Bob. Carlie thinks that it is time to ship Higgins to a baboon preserve, and Bob wants to keep him at home.
“Here’s the bottom line,” Carlie says. “I only believe people should have pets that are domestic animals. Bob believes that everything is fair game. He would have a lion if I let him.”
Did Carlie say HDTV?
“Yeah,” says Carlie. “I only got one at Christmas. Higgins has had one for about a year. He’s a TV fanatic. If you forget to turn it off, he’ll be sitting there at 3 in the morning.
“His favorites are ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and ‘Walker, Texas Ranger.’ ”
Bob, who’s owned wild animals all his life, admits Higgins has not always been a model pet. When Higgins was 3, he slept with the couple, often awakening Bob in the morning by climbing to the bedroom rafters and dropping onto Bob’s stomach. On one occasion, they got in a wrestling match, and Higgins put one of his “steel-like fingernails” through Bob’s scrotum.
Bob has considered moving him to a sanctuary, but “I’m just too attached to him,” he says.
Bob — who agreed to be photographed but would speak only on the condition that his and Carlie’s last names and hometown not be published, for fear of harassment from “ill-informed bleeding hearts” — is not the only human who has lost his heart to an inappropriate primate.
Last week, the country was mesmerized by the story of Sandra Herold, a 70-year-old widow in Stamford, Conn., whose 14-year-old, 200-pound chimpanzee, Travis, horribly mauled a close friend of the owner, tearing off her face. Ms. Herold, whose daughter had died in a car accident, had developed a relationship with him that went far beyond the ordinary owner-pet dynamic. She referred to Travis as her son, spoke of sleeping and bathing with him when he was small, and, in an interview with Jeff Rossen on the “Today” show, showed off his drawings, which, like a parent, she kept on the refrigerator door.
There are not many privately owned chimpanzees in the country — a census conducted for the Great Ape Project, an advocacy group, puts the number at about 225 — but there are many thousands of pet primates. Regardless of primates’ species or size, the people who keep them as pets seem to have a remarkably consistent way of looking at them. Even Bob, who condemns what he sees as Ms. Herold’s irresponsible sentimentality for permitting an adult chimpanzee to roam free so often (“she was delusional,” he says, “she anthropomorphized the primate to such a degree that he was more human than chimpanzee”), can’t help but acknowledge the unusually strong connection.
“He’s very beguiling,” Bob says. “He puts his hand out, looks at you with those beautiful brown eyes, and you feel compelled to hold hands.”
“I’d love to say he loves me,” Bob says scrupulously. “But he can’t.”
“He eats grapes with me,” he went on. “I can pick from his bowl. Unless it’s something he really likes.”
Bob’s feeling may have something to do, in this case as in many others, with the circumstances under which he first got to know his animal. After he paid $1,500 to a dealer in Missouri, Higgins arrived, at about 3 months old, in diapers, with a bottle. Although he had his own cage, in his own room, he often slept in the couple’s bed. Bob changed his diapers several times a day, and often took him to work at his construction equipment business, slipping him under his shirt. On the way back, they would get Higgins an ice cream.
Then, when Higgins turned 3, the problems began. Carlie, who after all runs a preserve that is home to a yak, two emus, alligators and a camel, found Higgins to be loving. But when he was out of the cage, she says, “he was just too destructive.”
“I live in a 200-year-old farmhouse,” Carlie says. “Jumping up and down trying to get out of his cage, he cracked the ceiling and the walls. He took all the filigree off my bedroom furniture. One day I went in to feed him and he grabbed me by the hair and yanked me against the cage. I ended up on the ground in tears, in such agony. They thought I had a detached retina.”
Bob has been bitten several times by Higgins, who now weighs 50 pounds and has large incisors. Once, when Bob was leading him from an outdoor enclosure back to his cage in the house, Higgins exploded and the two got into a battle so ferocious that despite the steel mesh glove Bob was wearing, he screamed for Carlie to get his .22 rifle and put a bullet in Higgins’s head. She got Higgins a slice of raisin bread instead, quickly defusing the fight. But Bob accepts it: a wild animal will never be domesticated, he says. Higgins now lives in a heated building on the property, which includes a 9-by-12-foot cage and a 30-by-12-foot outdoor exercise area with an 8-foot ceiling. One must pass through two locked doors to get inside Higgins’s cage. Even Bob doesn’t get in the cage with Higgins much anymore.
Allen Hirsch, a successful New York City painter, also bonded with his monkey early in its life. Benjamin, a 12-year-old capuchin monkey who came to Mr. Hirsch as a sickly mistreated infant, is like “a primordial human,” he says. “You recognize something very human in his gaze, a certain understanding, a certain awareness.”
From the start, Mr. Hirsch said, it has been a time-consuming, demanding relationship. After Benjamin bit off two of his own diseased toes, Mr. Hirsch stayed with him for four months, rarely leaving his side. Since having a monkey as a pet is illegal in New York City, he now keeps Benjamin in his country house in Catskill, N.Y., where a friend must often look after him. (New York State also banned monkeys as pets four years ago, but Benjamin is grandfathered in.)
But if owning Benjamin has kept him from traveling as much as he once did, that’s O.K. Mr. Hirsch has bathed with Benjamin, slept with him, and allowed him to play with his daughter, who is just about the same age; he sees the monkey as very much a family member.
“I never call him a pet,” Mr. Hirsch adds. “He’s a fellow creature I take care of.”
LOCAL and state regulations determine whether it’s legal to keep a primate pet, but April Truitt, the executive director of the Primate Rescue Center, a shelter outside Lexington, Ky., believes it’s never right.
A primate involves a much greater commitment than a cat or dog — or it should — because primates are social animals that cannot be left alone for long, and that live for decades: baboons for up to 45 years in captivity, chimps for 60 to 70. Once they have hit puberty, primates can become unpredictable and difficult to control. An adult chimp has seven times the strength of a man, Ms. Truitt says, but even a 24-pound monkey has the reflexes and agility to take down a man.
More fundamentally, Ms. Truitt believes, even the smallest monkeys are wild animals that do not belong in people’s homes.
But many prospective owners are badly informed, and, encountering adorable, docile baby primates with an eerie similarity to human infants, they find it difficult to resist.
Animal dealers, Ms. Truitt says, know that.
“The key to the trade is that these animals have to be removed at birth from the mother, put in diapers, put on a bottle and sold before they start depreciating — which they do, quicker than a Cadillac,” Ms. Truitt says. “By the age of 3, maybe 5 or 7, they reach adolescence and their hormones are telling them to do anything but take commands from humans. They are interested in dominating whatever social group they find themselves in. If it’s a human home, they often go after children first, then teenagers, then mom, and by the time they get to dad, we usually get the call.”
Dave Viguers, a 61-year-old I.B.M. software engineer who bought his first monkey 17 years ago, and his wife, Sandy, 62, do not agree with Ms. Truitt’s absolutist philosophy. Small monkeys born in captivity, they believe, can make great pets — as long as one can give them what they require.
“You are not getting a sweet baby monkey,” Ms. Viguers says. “You are taking on 45 years of trying to develop a monkey psychology that keeps you from being bitten and scratched, or finding yourself in a life of hell.”
The couple, who live on 75 acres in central Texas, have plenty of space for their six capuchins. Their living room, which has monkey-pattern armchairs and pillows, also houses a 60-square-foot octagonal cage, which leads into an outdoor 14-square-foot cage with children’s swings and slides and a 24-foot ceiling. They’ve also built a 500-square-foot monkey-house addition onto their own house, which opens onto an outdoor cage.
And the Viguerses, whose children are grown, do seem to understand the commitment and responsibilities inherent in what they call “the life.”
“Sandy and I for the longest time couldn’t go anywhere together,” Mr. Viguers says. “Then we went out and bought a 30-foot motor home, took the kitchen table out, and now there is a bank of cages for everybody right there. We’re going to a friend’s house in April, and there will probably be three or four of us with motor homes that bring our monkeys along, and we’ll figure out who gets along with who. The monkeys go to visit their friends.”
The Viguerses also clean the cages daily. Once a week, they scrub down the floors and toys.
It’s like having six kids who will never grow up, he is told.
Although capuchins in captivity can live 40 to 50 years, their future is secure. “These guys all have monkey godparents,” Mr. Viguers says. “In the event both of us bite the dust, they have a place to go.”
Many people seem to fall into primate ownership in the course of rescuing a sick, abused or abandoned animal.
Christine Bowers, who is 50 and lives in the small town of Cherry Valley, Ill., runs an auto reupholstery company called Stitch in Time. She has also rescued wild animals for 30 years. She heard of a crested black macaque that was said to be between four and six weeks old and suffering from salmonella poisoning, and then traveled to Chicago to save him.
“The guy who had him,” she says, “was an animal broker who told me, ‘He probably won’t make it, but I’ll give you a real deal: $3,200.’ ”
Did she pay it?
“Of course. The animal needed help.”
The monkey, whom she named Joey, “took to me like his mother,” Ms. Bowers says. “It’s this little creature who doesn’t want to be apart from you at all. I read that the woman” — Ms. Herold — “bathed with her chimp. When Joey was an infant, you couldn’t put him down to take a shower. He would crawl in, not necessarily to take a shower but to be with you.”
Ms. Bowers sewed flannel hunting shirts and jeans for Joey, and subscribed to the journal of the Simian Society of America to learn about care — and was amazed that people advertised to get rid of their monkeys. Still caring for an adorable baby, she couldn’t understand why.
“They’re wonderful when they’re infants,” she says. “But as they grow older they become primates. They are not little children, they are animals.”
Ms. Bowers realized just how much of an animal Joey was one evening when he was 6 and they were standing at the front door of her shop, from which he liked to watch traffic.
“He shivered and I leaned over and said, ‘Come here, baby, are you cold?’ and he exploded,” Ms. Bowers says. “He started biting and screaming at me, biting any place he could touch. It was a nightmare. We tipped over furniture, I would have killed him if I could. But he was so strong. I tried to choke him to make him stop. We fought for I don’t know how long. I was trying to hold him so he couldn’t bite me. I took one of my big fabric books and held it on his throat.”
Ms. Bowers was able to call a friend, who pulled the monkey off her. There were bites on her arms and legs; the web between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand was mangled. Still, it would be five years before she shipped Joey and the female monkey she had adopted to keep him company to the Born Free USA Primate Sanctuary near Dilley, Tex.
Asked why it took her so long, Ms. Bowers, who sends treat boxes to Joey and visits him once a year, begins to cry.
“I had made kind of that promise,” she says. “Like when you get a dog and you keep him until he dies.”
“He bit my arms, legs and face,” she adds. “It was terrifying, but I still love him.”
JUDIE HARRISON, 50 and three times married, is an extreme example of monkey love. She once demanded that her 15-year-old son give up his bedroom for a chimp, and today she is estranged from all three of her children because she put the primates first. Her passion also cost her her home.
Ms. Harrison had been interested in primates all her life. As a child, she wanted a chimp; later, as a divorced mother with young children in Delaware, she began rescuing monkeys, renting a 180-acre farm, where her current husband, Greg Harrison, joined her in 1994. At one point, she says, she had about 11 monkeys. Later, when the couple moved to Maryland, Ms. Harrison got a United States Department of Agriculture license allowing her to exhibit animals in public, and in 2000 she went commercial, charging $125 an hour for a capuchin monkey to do tricks at children’s birthday parties.
Two years later, she says, she bought Mikey, an 8-month-old chimp, from the Missouri Primate Foundation, the chimp farm reported to have sold Travis to Ms. Herold, for $45,000. (Calls to Ms. Herold and to the farm’s offices were not returned.) The Harrisons took out a second mortgage on their house, Ms. Harrison says, and flew to Missouri, where, as she tells it, they were allowed to gaze at Mikey in a crib but not approach for an hour, and the breeders brought out a 100-pound chimp to sit on her lap.
“I was scared to death,” she says. “To this day I still don’t know the reason behind it. I sat on the couch and watched Mikey rocking on his little crib, thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I just want to take him home.’ ”
Ms. Harrison understood that Mikey would grow to be large — she’d been told his father weighed 220 pounds. She knew he might live to be 60, but according to Ms. Harrison, one of her daughters, then 17, said she would carry on. Ms. Harrison took Mikey home, where she taught him how to brush his teeth with a Water Pik, and they played with building blocks. A year and a half later, thinking that Mikey needed company, she took out another $45,000 loan and bought a chimp named Louie.
Both chimps were quickly put into show business. Using chimps as performers has been condemned by animal rights activists like Jane Goodall, who notes on her Web site that after the animals become less manageable at puberty, around age 6 to 8, they often have their teeth pulled and are fitted with shock collars hidden under costumes. Mikey made an appearance on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” when he was less than 2.
“Mikey is a very big star in the entertainment world, probably one of the most famous chimps ever,” says Ms. Harrison, who appears to be somewhat conflicted on the subject. “I can give you his professional Web site, www.cognitivechimps.com. It’s sickening.” The site, which shows Mikey on the cover of a Black Eyed Peas album, in a Dolce & Gabbana ad and on the cover of the magazine of The New York Times, does confirm that Mikey was successful. He also wore a suit well.
Chimps do, however, require some sacrifice. The family living room was given over to their cages, and after Mikey, the larger chimp, began bullying Louie, Ms. Harrison made her son give up his bedroom, just off the living room, to Mikey. Her son, relegated to a room in the basement, chose to live with his father instead.
“I didn’t think it was fair for the chimps not to be able to see each other,” Ms. Harrison explains. She starts crying and says, “I destroyed a lot of lives with what I’ve done.”
She also took a lot of hard knocks herself. In a New York hotel for a job with Mikey, Ms. Harrison was letting the chimp groom her teeth, which is to say, pick at them — a not uncommon chimp habit and an example, perhaps, of a chimp simianizing a human.
“All of a sudden I feel a severe pain on the right side of my mouth and then I felt something dripping down my face,” Ms. Harrison says. “And there was all this blood, and I look over at Mikey and here he had my tooth in his hand, roots and all. He had pulled my tooth out with one finger.”
Mr. Harrison lost his job as a purchasing director for W. L. Gore & Associates because he was spending too much time with the chimp business. Despite the chimps’ income, debts were piling up. Meanwhile, the animals were growing stronger. Ms. Harrison began to notice Mikey barking and swatting at children, and becoming aggressive toward “small women.” (She does not volunteer the information that, U.S.D.A. officials said, their inspectors cited her for not handling her animals properly on at least three occasions, including an incident in which a woman was bitten.)
Last year, when Ms. Harrison was walking Mikey to the car on his leash, he lunged in the direction of a child riding a bike.
“You have to understand about chimps and dominance,” Ms. Harrison says. “As a chimp grows up, any being that is smaller they want to dominate, meaning they will kill them.”
The couple took out another loan, for about $35,000, and renovated their garage to accommodate a new monkey cage. When they unlocked the garage door and found Mikey sitting on top of the cage, Ms. Harrison says, she knew that the situation had become dangerous and that it was time to give them up. In October, the same month that Mikey and Louie found a new home, Ms. Harrison canceled her license.
Ms. Harrison says she and her husband have lost their home to foreclosure and are now renting a loft in Philadelphia. She is estranged from her three children, she believes, in large part because of all the attention she lavished on the chimps.
And yes, she insists, she also regrets having put the chimps into show business.
“It only gives people the idea that they are cute, they’re cuddly, they’re well behaved, they’re human-like,” Ms. Harrison says. “Well, you may see a commercial and you may see a chimp for 10 seconds, but that commercial took eight hours. They are cute and cuddly when they are 2 and 3 years old, but you can’t buy a chimpanzee just for a couple of years and then expect somebody else to raise them and take care of them for the next 50 or 60 years. I had all the intentions when I got my boys to keep them for the rest of my life. And then I couldn’t keep them safe.”
