David Goldenberg
 Courtesy New York Times Magazine Mikey isn't ready to retire yet. |
Mikey, as this particular chimp is known, is not an old man but a three-year old, a young child even by chimpanzee standards. Mikey has the characteristically pale face of very young chimps, which will darken significantly as he grows older. Older chimps are not often seen in the entertainment industry, not just because they are "unmanageable," but because their dark faces are considered distinctly less cute. Mikey belongs to Judie Harrison of Elkton, Maryland, who has worked with monkeys and apes in the entertainment business since opening Monkey Business three years ago. She now takes her act on the road, and Mikey is her young star.
Harrison, 47, and her husband bought Mikey, and an even younger chimp, Louie, from a private breeder at a cost of somewhere between $45,000 and $60,000 each. (Harrison won't say exactly how much they cost, nor will she name the breeder from whom she bought them.) "One is a second mortgage," she tells Gelf, "and the other is a third mortgage."
Among the many services that Monkey Business performs are public appearances at basketball games, photo ops at birthday parties, and the delivery of Chimp Grams in which Mikey, dressed in anything from a clown outfit to tails, brings balloons and a card to that special someone. In September, Monkey Business plans to open a permanent location called Party Safari that, according to its voicemail message, will feature "jungle-themed party rooms" and the opportunity to "have your photo taken with your favorite jungle friends." Mikey has also appeared in several advertisements and television shows, including Saturday Night Live, FHM magazine, as well as the cover of the Goodie Mob album, One Monkey Don't Stop No Show. (See more of Mikey's credits here.)
When the call came that the Times Magazine wanted to do a photo shoot, Harrison and Mikey drove up to the city, knowing little about the article for which they were posing. Once they found out, Harrison was a little bit upset. "My agent said if she had known [the subject of the article], she would have never even called me for the job," Harrison says. It's not that Harrison disagrees with the idea of sanctuaries; it's that she was afraid that it would misrepresent the situation in which her chimpanzees are kept. "I don't want people to think, 'Oh, that poor chimp,' " she says.
Indeed, Harrison vehemently disagrees with Siebert's statement that chimps older than six become unmanageable. And she feels that comparing her with scientists who do experiments on chimps is totally unfair. "I think anyone who has any part of [the experiments] should be shot," she says. "I'm not inflicting pain. I'm not jailing them up in jail cells." (Incidentally, Harrison has no such problems with the actual shoot. "The cover was so easy," Harrison says. "Mikey just had to sit in the beach chair. He's looking at me off to the left.")
Though Harrison has no formal training, she believes she is learning enough to care for Mikey into adulthood. "He's going to teach me and I'm going to teach him," says Harrison. She's also not worried that her chimps will become "unmanageable" once they grow substantially. Certainly, chimps continue to get bigger and stronger, and can do considerable damage. Earlier this year, St. James Davis was severely mauled by chimps—his foot, testicles, and part of his face were ripped off—as he and his wife visited their former pet chimp at an animal sanctuary in California (AP). But Harrison is not worried. "I understand their strength," she says. "Mikey is by far stronger than me now," she adds, recounting how the chimp once playfully broke off one of her molars at the root with one finger.
 Courtesy Judie Harrison Cerise Harrison with Louie (left) and Judie Harrison with Mikey. |
On the Jane Goodall Institute website, Goodall lists several problems with having chimps in the entertainment business, stating that even when young chimps are not abused by their handlers, they still suffer psychologically from being separated from their mothers at a young age. (In the wild, most chimps stay with their mothers until at least the age of eight.) Moreover, the fact that the chimps seen on TV and in advertisements are juveniles creates the false impression that these apes are cute and manageable pets, which in turn perpetuates the trade, Goodall says.
"Performing chimps are living ordinary, social lives," counters Harrison's husband, Greg. "No, they're not in the wild with other chimps, but who's to say that's the right answer? It's a matter of opinion. We're not child molesters."
The Harrisons contend that conservation groups like the Jane Goodall Institute are hypocritical, and that those organizations are more than willing to raise money using cute captive chimps as mascots. "If you look behind the scenes, they're doing the exact same thing," Judie says. Nona Gandelman, the VP of Communications for the Jane Goodall Institute, tells Gelf that while one or two sponsors for events involving Goodall might have thought it was a good idea to have a chimp like Mikey come and pose with her, the institute would have declined immediately. "It's a no-brainer," she tells Gelf. (Disclosure: I was a coauthor on a paper about chimpanzees with Goodall.)
Other conservation groups, including the Great Ape Project, have filed letters to city councils around Maryland asking them to refuse permits for the Harrisons to set up shop. After Ocean City's city council rejected their petition to lease a performance space on the town's boardwalk, Doug Cress of the Great Ape Project, who has complained loudly about the Harrisons in the past, told the Delaware News Journal that Harrison's operation was much worse than a zoo. "If anything, she's a carnival sideshow," he said.
I mention Cress's comments to Judie Harrison and ask her if she's heard of him. "I should know his name because I told him off," she says. Her husband Greg adds, "If it weren't for humans breeding exotic animals, they'd be extinct. The people that spend so much time worrying about who's in FHM or on the cover of the New York Times Magazine are wasting resources. If they put that kind of time, money, and effort into protecting animals in the wild, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
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