By MARC HANSEN
mahansen@dmreg.com
People are still talking about Travis, the 200-pound chimp who mauled a 55-year-old Connecticut woman in February.
Travis knew Charla Nash, the victim. Until the brutal attack, the two got along fine.
But then something snapped. Nash needs a face transplant and suffers from other gruesome wounds. "Horrific" is another word everyone seems to be using.
The animal was shot and killed by police. The chimp's owner is in shock.
The story has made its way around the world. The lesson seems obvious. Forget about having wild animals as pets. Even if they can plug in the computer and sell something on eBay, they will never be totally domesticated. A full-grown chimp isn't a furry surrogate child or a Mensa dog with thumbs.
Great apes can build fire, recognize themselves in the mirror, communicate with humans by pointing to symbols or punching a keyboard. They star in movies and TV commercials.
But they don't belong in private human homes.
A few of the smartest, most renowned symbol-pointers live in Des Moines at the 230-acre Great Ape Trust.
A discussion of the subject would be incomplete without hearing from some of the experts there.
The ape trust endorses the Iowa law, passed in 2007, that prohibits personal ownership of wild exotic animals, including apes and monkeys.
Some Iowans qualify for a grandfather exemption, which is why Ben the black bear was allowed to live in a roadside pen near Panora before he moved to Colorado.
Scientists Karyl Swartz and Robert Shumaker, the director of orangutan research at the ape trust, have spent decades working with great apes.
Shumaker states his unequivocal opinion on the trust's Web site: What happened in Connecticut is rare but helps further perpetuate the stereotype.
"It bothers me tremendously," he said, "that these sensational stories are distorting public perception.
"It is shocking to me that when these kinds of events occur, people quickly defend apes as pets. We get this reaction of, 'Oh, I'd do it all over again.' "
Swartz told me great apes that become pets are taken away from their mothers at a young age, which is wrong.
"That in itself is a terrible thing to do to any primate," she said. "We object to it in our own culture. We understand how horrible it is for both the mother and baby."
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh — a Great Ape Trust "scientist of special standing" who is known internationally for her work with bonobos — took the discussion to another level.
She surprised me by staying away from the hard line, declining to say chimps should never, under any circumstance, live with humans in private homes.
If they have the capacity to learn language and perform other amazing feats, it would be foolish to underestimate their potential to thrive among humans. That was my reading anyway.
Savage-Rumbaugh seems to believe anything's possible in a "bicultural" environment that mixes people with apes. A private home, however, is rarely bicultural.
"A lot of people," she said, "take them into their families, see the human side, form a very close attachment and try to raise them as they would a human child. It's not a good idea to put an ape in that situation. It would be like trying to raise a human as a pet."
Young chimps need to grow up around other young chimps. When they become adults, nature wants them to find mates.
Take your kids away from other children, pull them out of school and turn them into neighborhood novelty items. Unless you like anti-social behavior, you probably won't like the result.
Savage-Rumbaugh said she has helped raise at least 15 apes over the years.
"That means integrating myself into the group, caring for them and becoming emotionally bonded to them," she said.
The everyday people who own them are not evil, as a rule. Rank amateurs perhaps, but not evil.
"It's like trying to make a nuclear bomb," Savage-Rumbaugh said, "and having it blow up on you.
"Chimpanzees don't normally attack people in their homes. Something went wrong there, and I doubt it was just the chimpanzee."
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