By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block
On Sunday night, the first episode of the HBO docuseries, Chimp Crazy, aired. Just as we did with Tiger King, we are looking to see how this documentary addresses a largely hidden mistreatment of animals. Of course, we are hopeful that, as with any media emphasis on the plights of animals, this is the beginning of a new momentum in our society to treat nonhuman primates with greater dignity and respect than they currently receive.
Chimpanzees, as our closest living cousins in the animal kingdom, have suffered many threats and setbacks over the past decades. Since the 1960s, we have worked to end private ownership of chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates and to improve their circumstances in zoos, laboratories and roadside exhibits. We played an especially critical role in the campaign to wind down the use of chimps in animal research and testing.
One foundational contribution on that score involves the status of chimpanzees under U.S. federal law (the U.S. was the last country to subject chimpanzees to invasive experimentation). Because of habitat loss, disease and poaching, wild chimpanzees were classified as “endangered” in 1990, which provided wild chimpanzees with the highest level of protection under U.S. law. But chimpanzees kept captive in the U.S. were only classified as "threatened," with a “special rule” that deprived them of any protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.
For years, we worked to change that—arguing that it was unlawful for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to not extend endangered status—and the protections triggered by that status—to captive members of the species and that it undermined the conservation purpose of the ESA to allow continued exploitation of the U.S. captive population (whether in laboratories, zoos or the pet trade). Such a shift in status would be a gamechanger for captive chimpanzees. Finally, in 2015, we won: The agency announced that all chimpanzees, wild and captive, were endangered. This monumental change made immense change possible for captive chimps, allowing for the use of the ESA—a powerful legal tool—to advance the welfare of individual captive chimps.
The first episode of Chimp Crazy tells the story of a lawsuit brought against a woman in Missouri who owned several chimpanzees as pets and who considered herself their “mother”—not merely a self-deluding notion but a gross misunderstanding of her obligations to these essentially wild animals as well as of the plights so many chimpanzees and other primates bred for the captive wildlife trade.
That trade is nothing short of abysmal. Breeders typically pull newborn primates from their mothers soon after birth, which is nothing less than traumatizing for both. The infants are then sold to people who try to force these wild animals into domestic life in human homes, denying them everything that is natural to their species. It is common for pet primates to develop severe anxiety and self-destructive behaviors.
In this case, the individual kept the chimps—who were used for birthday parties, movies and even photographed for greeting cards—locked in cramped cages as they became too large to handle, and that’s where they were found when rescuers arrived to transfer them, after a judge’s ruling allowed their transfer to an accredited sanctuary, where they could be properly taken care of by professional caregivers.
The lawsuit that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed and won to free these animals was possible because the Endangered Species Act regulations had been extended to cover captive chimpanzees.
The flip side, of course, is that many other primate species can still be legally owned as pets, even though keeping primates as pets is inhumane and dangerous. Other primate species flooding the trade including baboons, capuchins, lemurs, macaques, marmosets and more. An inconsistent patchwork of state laws across the U.S. allows the primate pet trade to flourish, despite risks to everyone involved.
Not only can primates transmit bacterial, viral, parasitic and fungal infections that pose serious risks to human health, but coming into close contact with captive primates can lead to serious injury. More than 300 dangerous incidents (primarily attacks and escapes) involving primates kept as pets have occurred since 1990 across 41 states. One particularly horrible incident brought attention to the Captive Primate Safety Act, which has been reintroduced in one Congress after another. These incidents injured 153 adults and 78 children and resulted in the deaths of more than three dozen primates.
A decade before Joe Exotic became a household name, our undercover investigation delved into the bizarre world of Joseph Maldonado-Passage and his roadside zoo, GW Exotics. The Tiger King series about big cat breeding that began airing on Netflix in 2020 brought a raised awareness in pop culture of the private ownership of big cats, perhaps even helping us in the final push needed to secure passage of the Big Cat Public Safety Act, a federal law prohibiting keeping big cats as pets, in 2022.
Right now, an unknown number of nonhuman primates are suffering and languishing unseen in homes across the U.S., locked away in basements, or being dressed up as human babies in bedrooms. Passage of the Captive Primate Safety Act would finally put an end to the captive primate pet trade in the U.S. It is time to recognize that this is absolutely no way to treat these wild animals, and that it is time to do something about it. It is time for the captive primate pet trade to end.
Kitty Block is CEO of the Humane Society of the United States.
