“MOnky love is completely different from love for a child…When you adopt a monkey, the bond is much deeper…Human children grow up and bond with other people in society. But chimpanzees are different. For them, their mother is everything in their life. ”
So says chimpanzee fan Tonia Haddix at the beginning of the documentary series Chimpanzee Crazy. We meet her (human) son later. He seems to have resigned himself… generously.
You could spend four hours of Chimp Crazy digging into those opening words, but there's so much more to understand. From the creator of the pandemic-era blockbuster Tiger King comes another American-only story involving exotic animals and their Homo sapiens caretakers, created just for the story by a genius or a madman. produced.
In reality, this is just a Missouri story. Connie Casey chose to set up shop here in the 1970s because the state had previously lax laws regarding the breeding, trade and ownership of exotic animals. Casey became a chimpanzee supplier to just about anyone who wanted to own a cute little baby chimpanzee without thinking about tomorrow – by the time they were too strong to be pets. He had become so unpredictable that he was often brought back to Casey.
Haddix, a chimpanzee enthusiast, began working as a part-time volunteer at the Missouri Primate Foundation in Cayce, but soon became fully involved in the project. She was especially enthusiastic about one of its inhabitants – Tonka. “He loved me as much as I loved him. It was supposed to be like…the love of God.” PETA filed a lawsuit against Casey when he blew the whistle on the conditions in which the animals were kept (down from 42 at the foundation's peak). Haddix tried to block the lawsuit by formally protecting all chimpanzees. PETA simply added her name to the case and succeeded in removing the animals and returning them to a certified sanctuary (given their age, releasing them back into the wild was not a viable option).
All but one person. Tonka was missing. He's dead, Haddix told them, and us. where is your body? She had him cremated. Can she prove it? of course. She holds a plastic bag containing a pinkish powder in her hand. Cremated chimpanzee bodies are not like that. Does she have any other evidence? I received an email from the crematorium. he is her husband. The body was reportedly incinerated at 170 degrees. This is enough to bake scones. PETA thinks Tonka might be hiding somewhere. A new investigation begins and the next two episodes continue until it is completed, which takes several years. Haddix, meanwhile, has set up a private petting zoo for exotic animals and funds it by trading them.
Chimp Crazy isn't as flashy or crazy as Tiger King. Haddix is certainly a “character.” Her Dolly Parton-esque image and her unblinking insistence on the maternal bond between a woman and her chimpanzee baby, Tonka's sad death, and the fact that she told Tonka in text after he gave birth. Given the fact that she's referring to Death, she named it in honor of the capuchin monkey. But there's a dark undertone to the twisted relationships in the show, the unmet needs of both humans and animals, and the ruthlessness of Joe Exotic and, you know, everything that Tiger King could have gotten away with hiring a hitman. elements fill the whole. The moral flaws of the various people featured, the lack of empathy, the denialism, and the chimpanzees' obvious suffering (their desperate flinging around their cages is evidence of mostly hilarious elation by their keepers) ) makes you long to calculate. Not just a rescue.
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Eric Goode's approach, which lingers on the telegenic but irrelevant aspects of Haddix's character, is similarly hard to empathize with. She is filmed at many of her cosmetic “tweaks” and beauty appointments, and her underlying motives are presented as more of a joke than a character worth considering. More importantly, she never consented to the documentary in the first place. Mr. Goode's notoriety in the post-Tiger King exotic animal world led him to hire another person with experience in the trade of such animals (which led to his “relationships with the federal government”). ”, otherwise he would have been sentenced to 14 months in prison) (as it were) as an “acting director”. It's an ethical gray area at best. If you want to make a point about the exploitation of helpless animals, this is not the best place. If that is indeed Good's intention. Most of the time, his films seem content to make audiences point, laugh, and gasp at the ongoing game of weasel and mouse/PETA and chimps. It's really dark.
