Television Review | First there was a sensational series about tiger parks, now women who have a twisted relationship with chimpanzees are being filmed

Tiger King was the strange true crime case of spring 2020. Story From Joe Exoticabout his tigers and crimes was incredible and gruesome.

Tiger King director Eric Gooden new series Chimp Crazy tells about American women whose passion for raising chimpanzees as if they were their own children takes on sick features.

Tiger King the level of strangeness and confusion is not reached this time, fortunately in a way. Chimp Crazy proceeds slowly one step at a time.

The director’s reflection on his journalistic independence brings an additional level to the series. Chimp Crazy also grows into a meta-documentary about how such a documentary program is made and how the authors get involved with their subject. Because Goode is known in the animal industry Tiger King after, he hired a substitute director to appear as the documentary’s creator. This allowed him to describe chimpanzee owners who would not have spoken to him.

A four-piece the name of the first episode of the documentary series is Monkey Love. It has a double meaning. It’s about both a man’s love for a monkey and a monkey’s stupid love. Having chimpanzees as children Tonia Haddix calls herself the “Dolly Parton of chimpanzees,” perhaps because she wears heavy make-up and dresses in a rather un-zookeeper-like fashion. He talks about “love for these animals” while forcing whipped cream through the bars of the cage and into the chimpanzee’s mouth.

Lawyer for Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), an organization that defends animal rights Brittany Peet describes the culture that Haddix represents. It consists almost entirely of women who perpetuate the myth that the monkey is their child and a member of their family.

Pets are of course family members for many. However, these monkey owners go much further. Tonia tells how she loves her chimpanzees more than her own children: “The bond with an adopted monkey is much deeper”. His son tells the camera he agrees. The grown-up son of another woman who raised monkeys as her children tells the same thing tearfully.

Document shows how this fantasy leads in many ways to tragedy. Little monkeys are cute and cuddly. They are completely dependent on their caretakers and play nicely. Being intelligent, they know how to communicate more than other animals and are, in a strangely fascinating way, almost like human children.

As adults, however, they are big, powerful and unpredictably aggressive. The aftertaste is rough at worst. It’s part of American true crime that we get to see everything very closely.

The Tonka chimpanzee appeared in Hollywood movies as a young child. Picture: HBO

Pam Rosaire breastfed a chimpanzee at the same time as her own child and ended up in the newspapers. A human child nursed with a chimpanzee, his daughter, tells how the monkey brother was jealous of her boyfriends.

Rosaire has lived her whole life with monkeys and yet she claims in the documentary, obviously wrongly, that “monkeys understand every word we say and that they are as intelligent as we are”.

Great apes can learn many words, but understanding every word is probably an exaggeration. Instead, monkeys, like other animals, read our emotions very accurately. The way of life described in the entire documentary appears to be the priority of emotions. Emotions have overtaken thinking and reason. In that sense, it is a turbocharged version of the rest of society.

Yet In the 1990s, monkeys were used in Hollywood films. Alan Cumming appeared with a chimpanzee named Tonka in a 1996 film Buddy – a stud guy. In the documentary, Cumming says that the collaboration and connection with Tonka was “magical.”

Cumming understands that the world was different in the 1990s, and no Buddy’s such a film would no longer be made.

Alan Cumming starred with Tonka in the movie Buddy. He has been involved in Peta’s activities. Picture: HBO

Cumming says that he imagined that after his Hollywood career, Tonka retired to Palm Springs “with pensioners and gays”. Instead, the chimpanzee crawled as a prisoner in a cage amidst feces and garbage, gaining weight from the Happy Meals and marshmallows fed to it Connie Casey’s in the shelter.

Connie Casey bred Tonka and many whole generations of chimpanzees for Hollywood movies. As many as three-quarters of America’s chimpanzees are said to have been bred by Casey at some point.

It was a profitable business. Casey drew monkeys for greeting cards. He came up with the chimparty concept, where a chimpanzee cub became a party guest. Above all, Casey long dominated the US chimpanzee trade. He got up to 60,000 dollars for one puppy.

Of money problems followed from the chimpanzee business. The documentary shows how chimpanzees behave dangerously at parties.

A journalist who visited Casey’s sanctuary described the place as a nursery and a prison for old chimpanzees. The chimpanzees in their cages munched on marshmallows and drank powerade until they got too big, old and cranky. Casey was reported to Peta. He turned his farm into a non-profit charity and continued doing the same thing. In the series, we will see how the shelter is doing.

Monkeys the women who consider her children feel that Peta does not understand them or the chimpanzees. “This is America, they can’t take your kids!” Tonia is shouting on the phone to another mother monkey.

According to Pam Rosaire, the chimpanzees in the entertainment industry have been “humanized”.

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“The chimpanzees were munching marshmallows and drinking Powerade in their cages.”

“They want coffee in the morning, and they don’t want to go out in the rain,” he says, watching TV in the living room, with a chimpanzee on a leash, who occasionally jumps dangerously.

Monkeys are kept in many different conditions, some of which do not meet their needs at all. Picture: HBO

Tonia Haddix says that he had 75 foster children in his time. She started caring for foster children at the age of 19, when her husband forbade her to work.

The documentary shows how she just wants someone to take care of. Peta, on the other hand, wants him out of the animal welfare business. Like Petan Jared Goodman says in the documentary: “Love is not enough. A monkey needs more than a non-professional who sees herself as a loving mother can give.”

Chimp with Crazy Max.