Here are a few photos of Mikey and Louie playing in our yard before we placed them at the Little Rock Zoo in October of 2008. As I quote in another article in regards to the Rosair circus, Chimpanzee stand upright to make themselves look bigger. This is a behavior that is part of displaying. Louie had more of a tendency to stand upright then Mikey did while playing because Louie was smaller then Mikey, so Mikey had an advantage over him with size, strength and height.
In this photo Louie, the smaller chimp is on the right, notice how he's in an upright position to look larger and Mikey is in a charging position. This is all in play because they are still very young. This kind of behavior would be seen differently at an older age. This is practice for them for the future of dominance.
Please notice also that even though they are still young they had harness's on and waist collars that were hooked together for double safety and to have control of the upper body which is where all of their strength is. Anyone that has a chimpanzee that is not caged nor under the complete control of the handler is being irresponsible to say the least. Chimpanzees at the age of 5 years old are already stronger then a human and anyone that raises a chimp is well aware of this fact, just by living with them. So to allow something like what happened in the Herold/Nash/Travis/ case was nothing but being irresponsible on the owners part. You can read all of the articles on this blog under "Travis the Chimp" I would never have allowed either one of my chimps to be free in or out of the house without having some kind of control over them. I do hope that those that still have pet chimps can make the same decision I made. It was a difficult one, I truly love Mikey and Louie, miss them every minute of every day but I knew I had to do right by them. I loved them enough to let them be Chimps.
No comments:
Post a Comment