Revenge of the Chimp

LOS ANGELES — In 1967, LaDonna Davis’ boyfriend went on a trip to Tanzania and came back with quite a surprise: a chimpanzee. It was a baby still, an orphan her boyfriend 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. The boyfriend, a stock-car racer named St. James, would carry the little fellow in a sling around his chest as he worked at his auto body shop in West Covina, Calif. When she married St. James a couple of years later, Moe was “a combination of flower-thrower and best man,” LaDonna Davis recalls.

“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. The women glow with the memories.

Wait a minute. Aren’t they forgetting a part — the point when Davis surely must have thought: This is crazy! A chimp? In our house?!?

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 an attorney’s office, she gingerly moves her left hand, swaddled in the 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, an event so traumatic she would be forgiven for not talking 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 that mauled her hand – and attacked her husband with such 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.”

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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.

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 alternative lifestyles, the return to nature — popular culture was filled with lovable primates such as Clint Eastwood’s “Every Which Way but Loose” orangutan, and the chimps in the children’s show “Lancelot Link/Secret Chimp” — comic relievers who mocked the absurdity of the human condition.

Jane Goodall’s research revealed chimps’ intelligence, sensitivity and uncanny similarities to humans: how they use tools, how they live in families. Her later studies would chart more brutal behavior, such as their 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. The Davises once briefly left him in the car, the door tied shut. But rascally Moe rolled down the window. 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.

There was the time Moe, an occasional performer in sitcoms and commercials, participated in a fund-raiser for Actors and Others for Animals. Lassie was there, too, and the parrot from “Baretta,” but “the line for Moe was about three times as long as the lines for the others!”

In 1998, Moe helped apprehend a car thief. He was in his outdoor cage when Davis and a friend heard him rattling the bars and clapping his hands. The friend went to check and saw a man in a ski mask emerge from a car. He had vanished by the time police arrived, but Moe pointed to next door. Officers headed that way just as the suspect appeared in the yard.

Some people in West Covina looked askance at this unconventional domestic situation. City officials tried to evict Moe a few years after his arrival, but the judge ruled for the Davises. Moe, he proclaimed, “is somewhat better behaved than some people.”

He made their lives complete, Davis says. Cancer had left her infertile, and they had once considered adopting children. Moe, she says, “changed my wants and feelings.”

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Moe had lived peaceably with the Davises for more than 30 years when, in 1998, he escaped from his 10-by-12-foot outdoor enclosure and rampaged through the neighborhood.

The Davises said Moe had been frightened by an electrical shock when a worker tried to repair his cage. But it took several police officers and animal control workers to restrain him, and an officer’s hand was mauled, city officials said.

The next year, a visitor put her hand inside Moe’s cage, though the Davises said they warned her. They say she had long red fingernails that looked like Moe’s favorite licorice. He bit, and the Davises later settled a lawsuit with the woman.

The next day, West Covina officials removed Moe to a wildlife refuge.

The Davises were devastated. They cried. They lost sleep. They became ill. And they fought back, in petitions, fund-raisers and heart-rending media interviews. Reporters found St. James Davis weeping outside a court hearing: “I want our family back together!”

Chimpanzees have always inspired reactions more complex than that of other exotic animals, primatologists say.

“They look so much like humans,” says Virginia Landau, director of ChimpanZoo, a research program at the Jane Goodall Institute in Tucson, Ariz. “When you look in their eyes, it’s not like the eyes that look back at you from a mountain lion. It’s the eyes of an intelligent creature.”

That may be why many animal lovers tried to bring chimpanzees into their homes, a practice now prohibited or tightly regulated in about 22 states. The Humane Society of the United States, which strongly opposes wild animals in private homes, estimates that up to 15,000 chimps nationwide may be living as pets.

Except, Landau noted, many chimp owners “don’t really think of it as a pet — they think of it as a replacement for a child.”

And Moe was no longer a child. He was in vigorous middle age, a roughly four-foot, 130-pounder with the upper-body strength of three linebackers. West Covina officials maintained that he could no longer live within city limits.

A years-long legal battle ensued. Eventually all criminal charges were dropped and the Davises won a $100,000 judgment in their due-process suit against the city. But Moe still couldn’t come home.

The Davises visited Moe regularly until 2003, when the sanctuary had licensing problems. After months of negotiation, Moe was transferred to Animal Haven Ranch, near Bakersfield. Last October they went to see him — the first time in five years they had spent substantial time with him.

It wasn’t home, but LaDonna Davis was realizing it might be the best they could do. “You can’t spend your entire life in battle,” she says.

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Primatologists say the animal sanctuary was almost certainly the best move for Moe. For all the love lavished on him, he needed his space. The two attacks were symptoms of discontent.

“He was caged up and frustrated and a little bit territorial,” says Craig Stanford, a professor of anthropology and biology at the University of Southern California. He needed the companionship of other chimps. At Animal Haven Ranch, he had them.

The 22-acre nonprofit sanctuary was founded by Virginia and Ralph Brauer for exotic pets that had worn out their welcome, castoffs from circuses and zoos. The Brauers had six primates plus Moe, who as a newcomer to the animal world was kept in his own cage.

In a cage nearby were four other chimps, including males Buddy, 16, and Ollie, 13, who had worked for a Hollywood animal trainer until they grew too strong and aggressive.

The Davises made the three-hour drive to see Moe every 10 days or so, bringing enough food for the entire menagerie. Yet LaDonna Davis says she never ventured over to visit the other chimps.

“They were just … different animals,” she says carefully.

The day of the attack, March 3, started as a happy one — the day they celebrated as Moe’s 39th birthday. The couple arrived with special treats: new toys and a beautiful sheet cake with raspberry filling. As her husband headed toward the cage with Moe’s favorite chocolate drink, Davis remembers seeing their chimp clap his hands with joy.

She put the cake on the table next to Moe’s cage and got the rest of the presents. She cut two pieces of cake. When St. James handed one to Moe through an opening in the cage, the chimp dug in immediately, smearing icing all over his lips.

As LaDonna moved to cut her own piece, she glimpsed something to her left. It was one of the teen-age male chimps. He was out of his cage.

“I made eye contact with him,” she says. “That instantly changed his demeanor.”

He slammed into her backside, knocking her into St. James. Just like that, the chimp “just chomped off my thumb.”

Her husband pushed her under the table, and the chimps — because now a second had appeared — turned their frenzy on him.

LaDonna watched as one latched onto St. James’ head, the other onto his foot. And here, she chokes on the words: “They virtually were — I don’t know how you say it — eating him alive.”

Davis says she screamed and the Brauers’ son-in-law, Mark Carruthers, came running. Carruthers retrieved a handgun, according to Davis and police accounts. As Buddy lifted his head, Carruthers came in close and fired a single bullet into the animal’s brain.

As Buddy fell away, Ollie began dragging St. James’ mutilated body away. The 62-year-old man was conscious but near death. He had lost his nose, an eye, most of his fingers, both testicles and much of the flesh from his buttocks and face and left foot.

Carruthers followed, and fired again.

And then it was over.

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Why did they do it?

It’s the question that hangs over almost every conversation about the case. Chimp attacks on humans are highly unusual. How could this have happened to people who knew and loved these creatures so well?

USC’s Stanford gets frustrated with this kind of talk. “If a tiger attacked these people, you wouldn’t say, ‘Why was this tiger angry?’ ” he says.

Stanford’s point is: They were wild animals. Intelligent enough to learn to jimmy the lock on their cage and push through two other doors Virginia Brauer accidentally left unsecured, according to an investigation by the Kern County sheriff. But immune to our attempts to psychoanalyze or blame.

Were they jealous? Stanford argues it was probably much simpler than that: The chimps were out of their cage, their comfort zone. Moe was the new, threatening male who needed to be taken down a peg, but they couldn’t get at him. So “they attacked the first individuals they came across who were in their immediate territory.”

For the ugly truth is that these kinds of attacks are quite common — in the wild, against other chimpanzees. Males are highly territorial; if threatened, they will shred a rival’s genitals, rip out his windpipe.

“They just have the same tendencies as all of us,” says Stanford. “Some individuals can be violent and nasty, others not.”

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For weeks, Davis went without seeing Moe. Almost every day has been spent with her husband, who remains in a medically induced coma, fighting for his life.

“I don’t think he’ll ever be the same,” Davis says.

St. James has had more than a dozen surgeries so far; the Davises, who are uninsured, could end up with medical bills totaling more than a million dollars, according to their lawyer, Gloria Allred. The couple has decided against suing Animal Haven because the ranch had no liability insurance. Allred and Davis persuaded a state senator to sponsor a bill requiring animal sanctuaries to carry insurance.

On a recent Sunday, Davis went to see Moe. It was May 8. Mother’s Day.

“I had some fear” going back to the scene, she says. But there was her boy, jumping up and down as she waved to him, and then she did not feel so afraid.