Hotmail
The animal within
Behind the story of a brutal attack
The Washington Post |
LOS ANGELES - In 1967, LaDonna Davis's boyfriend went on a trip to Tanzania and came back with quite a surprise: a chimpanzee. It was a baby still, an orphan that St. James Davis said he had rescued from the poachers who killed its mother, and it was just adorable -- "a large teddy bear," LaDonna's mother declared. They named him Moe.
St. James, a stock-car racer, became so bonded to Moe that he would carry the little fellow in a sling around his chest as he worked at his auto body shop in West Covina, Calif. When St. James and LaDonna married a couple of years later, Moe was "a combination of flower-thrower and best man," LaDonna recalls, sitting across from her mother this sunny spring day.
"Tell her about . . . " interrupts her mother, Terry DeVere.
"Oh . . . well . . ." says Davis, with well-practiced delicacy: "Moe . . . peed on a woman." All the excitement of the reception, maybe too much punch. DeVere and her daughter glow with the memories of the beautiful day and of the beautiful years that followed.
Davis and her mother glance at each other.
This wasn't just any chimp, they explain patiently. This was Moe.
"He would reach his hands out and put them around your neck," says Davis, a sun-creased blonde of 64. "You couldn't turn it off," all that charm, all that love.
As Davis tells her story in the sleek conference room of a Los Angeles attorney's office, she gingerly moves her left hand, swaddled in the cotton gauze and tape that protect what remains of her thumb, a reminder that this train of sweet memories and funny stories is not going to end well.
For Davis is here to talk about a terrible thing that happened to her, an event so traumatic, so bitterly ironic, she would be forgiven for not wishing to talk about it at all. But she must. As news of the incident rocketed around the world, Davis fears some people may have come to assume that the chimp who mauled her hand and attacked her husband with such a frenzy that he remains in critical condition two months later, struggling for his life, his face forever disfigured -- was Moe.
And she wants them to know this: "I wouldn't change anything about what we did."
Moe slept in their bed until he got too big. He learned to use the toilet. He loved to watch cowboys and Indians on TV. A pretty normal childhood, as Davis describes it.
Animals, like babies, "learn the words no and yes, they learn a caress, and what love means," she says.
Good animals and bad
And just as there are good people and bad people, she says, there are good animals and bad, those who want to learn and those who do not.
She adds: "I don't know if you could do this today. . . . Maybe I was one of the select blessed few."
Southern California in the 1960s and '70s was a place where it was perhaps not beyond the pale to welcome a chimpanzee into your family. In tune with everything else going on -- the flourishing of alternative lifestyles, the return to nature, the quest for authenticity -- popular culture was filled with lovable primates, from Ronald Reagan's Bonzo to Clint Eastwood's "Every Which Way but Loose" orangutan and countless sitcom monkeys in between -- adorable comic relievers who mocked the absurdity of the human condition. One of the most subversively brilliant TV shows was the children's program "Lancelot Link/Secret Chimp," in which costumed chimps were put through their paces in skits whose plot lines they would hijack to hilarious effect, forcing the voice-over actors to improvise dialogue.
Jane Goodall's research revealed the intelligence and sensitivity of chimpanzees, and their uncanny similarities to humans -- how they use tools, how they live in families. Her later studies would chart more brutal behavior -- such as the chimps' capacity to engage in systematic warfare -- yet the images that stuck were those of soulful, sociable creatures.
Davis recounts life with Moe in sunny anecdotes that sound like scenes from the goofball comedies of the era. On a day trip to Morro Bay, they briefly left him in the car, the door tied shut. But rascally Moe rolled the window down. They returned to an empty car and panicked until someone from a nearby restaurant called to them. Moe was in the kitchen, surrounded by new friends, happily snacking on french fries and milk.
- Discuss Story On Newsvine
-
Rate Story:
View popularLowHigh - Instant Message
MORE FROM U.S. NEWS |
 U.S. news Section Front |
| Add U.S. news headlines to your news reader: |
Boost your career with an online Degree. Pick from Leading Colleges!
www.EarnMyDegree.com
Sponsored links
Resource guide