Travis the chimp is getting a bad rap. While he did maul a woman and attack the police before being shot to death, it’s a bit unfair to say he went berserk. If a human did that, sure, he went berserk. But a chimp?
You might as well get angry at a German for eating shit.
Chimps are people but they’re jungle people. They don’t belong in our world any more than we belong in theirs. It’d be nice to live in a city where chimp and human could peacefully co-exist but, so far, no one has built it. As things stand, you cannot just live with a chimp and expect it to turn out well. Ask my mother.
Whatever one may think about the sort of people who name a chimp –or a human– Travis, one thing is abundantly clear: They should not have had a pet chimp. No one should. A chimp is not a pet.
Was the store out of Eskimos?
It’s terrible that Travis was shot in the street. And I doubt he cared much about his career in television. We certainly don’t congratulate terrorists for putting their hostages on television. And just look at that picture: Travis is in a squalid cage.
He should have been where he belonged, getting groomed by some comely young chimpette and eating the very best bananas. Instead, for fifteen years, he was locked up and made a fool of. He finally attacks someone. It’s bad enough we shot him but do we have to say that he’s gone mad too?
How many chimps do humans kill every year for worse reasons than that? I don’t see much of an outcry about our sanity. Human kills chimp is hardly news.
Travis escaped his cage, attacked his captors and was murdered for it. Not only was he sane, he was also brave.
RIP Travis. I hope the chimps that come next have a better go of it.
3 comments
Mego!
February 18, 2009 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Here here.
Ryan Oakley
February 18, 2009 at 6:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Authorities are trying to determine why the chimp, a veteran of TV commercials who could dress himself, drink wine from a glass and use the toilet, suddenly attacked.”
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090218/D96E8V4O1.html
The answer is right there. Chimps don’t care to be on tv and they like being naked. They don’t drink wine at all or anything from a glass and have no need for a toilet.
This shit might as well read: “Authorities are still trying to figure out why the lion, a voice actor in commercials, who was known to enjoy a pleasant glass of brandy and a cigar in the evening while wearing his slippers, went insane and suddenly attacked a neighbourhood deer.”
S. Mick
July 5, 2010 at 4:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Travis was working for Al-Qaeda.