11/19/2023 0 Comments St.james davis chimpanzee attackState wildlife and county health authorities were testing the chimps for rabies and other diseases that could affect the victims’ health, Chealander said.ĭavis and his wife, LaDonna Davis, 64, were visiting the sanctuary to celebrate the birthday of a 39-year-old chimpanzee, Moe, who was taken from their home in 1999 after biting off part of a woman’s finger. “A big part of the investigation will be figuring out whether the owners were in compliance with regulations,” Sheriff’s Cmdr. It is allowed to house up to nine primates at one time and is home to one spider monkey and six chimpanzees. They were shot to death during Thursday’s attack by the son-in-law of the sanctuary’s owners, Virginia and Ralph Brauer.Īnimal Haven Ranch, about 30 miles east of Bakersfield, has held state permits to shelter exotic animals since 1985. On Friday, authorities continued to investigate how two chimps at an animal sanctuary escaped from their cage and mauled St. “Chimps can be violent at times just as humans can be.” They defend their territory against any perceived threat,” said Craig Stanford, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies primate behavior. Generally weighing between 120 and 150 pounds with strength much greater than man, chimps in the wild are known to kill chimps from neighboring groups, hunt other primates and even attack humans. But they’re really aggressors, primate experts say, more than capable of carrying out attacks as violent as one that left a man fighting for his life. (AP) – Chimpanzees come across to the public as little darlings, often in diapers and always willing to hold hands. “We shouldn’t be taking them away from there.HAVILAH, Calif. “They’re meant to be out in the forest,” she said. People are ultimately responsible for a situation in which the apes are being squeezed from their natural homes, Pusey said. They may have seen these people as intruders.” “Some chimps are highly territorial and can attack and kill. “We humanize them, but we’re referring to wild animals here,” the sanctuary’s director, Bala Amarasekaran, told Reuters. “These chimps have had a bad life,” she said. Abused and abandoned, the chimps sometimes end up in sanctuaries like the one in Sierra Leone, but their negative experiences with their original captors is another possible motivation for the Tacugama attack, Pusey said. The young chimps are cute and cuddly, but beyond about 5 years old, most cannot be easily controlled. Also, people in Africa kill chimps for meat, and the hunters will sometimes take in the orphaned babies to keep or sell. Goodall’s website, sounds warnings about the loss of habitat that has greatly diminished the number of wild chimpanzees.Ī major cause of the human-chimp confrontations in Uganda, according to the BBC Wildlife Magazine article, is the increasing proximity of farms to the chimps’ forest habitat. Pusey also is head of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies, named for a woman who is well known for her pioneering work with chimps in Tanzania. “This attack seems quite a lot like what they sometimes do to each other,” said Pusey, professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota. Typically, a few animals will hold a lone victim down while the others beat and tear at it. Male chimps patrol their territory in bands and will sometimes kill males from neighboring groups. It’s possible, chimp expert Anne Pusey said in a recent interview, that Bruno and his mates were displaying territorial aggression. Still, attacks on humans remain rare, and the cause of the Sierra Leone incident is unknown. Biologically, they are the closest animals to humans, sharing more than 98 percent of the same DNA with our far more deadly species. That chimps can be homicidal should not be surprising. An adult male chimpanzee may be only 4 feet tall and weigh 110 pounds, but he is at least five times as strong as a man. “I had no idea a chimpanzee was capable of doing that to a human,” Kern County Fire Capt.
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