Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - The Official Chimp Crazy Podcast: Episode Four

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

This week Wes, Jeff and Mike reflect on the final episode of the series and their takeaways from the season. Then Wes speaks with filmmakers Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride about what it was like when Tonia found out about the crew’s involvement in Tonka’s fate, and they’re later joined by Dr. Carl Safina, professor of Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University who explains the dangers of anthropomorphism.  Watch Episode every episode of the HBO Documentary Series Chimp Crazy on Max. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, welcome back to our partnership with HBO's Chimp Crazy. We're tooth and claw, and we'll be recapping each episode of this bananas docus series. You come up with that, Wes? That's funny. I snuck that in there. Plus, we'll be talking with the filmmakers to get some behind the scenes details from each episode of Chimp Crazy. So we're going to get into our recap for episode four. This is the final episode of the series.

A lot happens. so we'll try and get through it all. We start with Tanya and she's talking about Tanka and how he makes her feel safe and he has the softest eyes and it's over this King Kong footage. I'm not sure which version of King Kong, but it's like a colored one. But she's saying like he would never hurt her

and he's so loyal, even more loyal than her husband. We then see that Tanya has been found out. Law enforcement is at her house. They're there to remove Tanka because if you remember at the end of the last episode our filmmakers had turned evidence over to Pita to let them know that Tonka was indeed at Tanya's residence in Lake of the Ozarks. So they're there. They're there to get Tanka.

Dwayne wears a wire to go undercover, our proxy director, and visit Tanya's house the night before they removed Tanka. And Tanya's saying that she doesn't know who gave her up. But it kind of to me feels like she's giving Dwayne the opening to confess. Like maybe she's like hinting that it was him. Well, and when Dwayne tried to talk to her son, He just stared daggers at it. Yeah. So Tanya records this whole day that Tanka's removed.

She's very upset. A vet darts Tanka. The vet runs an EKG and does a full physical examination on Tanya's patio and says, yeah, Tonka's good to go. Then we skip and we see more about Sandy and Travis. So if you remember, Travis was the chimpanzee who in 2009 attacked Charla Nash, ripped her face off. It was a really tragic, horrible thing, and Travis had been killed by police.

So Sandy, after this incident, she had the press knocking at her door and she had to go into hiding. And she was totally inconsolable and really didn't move on from this thing. But she also didn't move on from her relationship with Travis. She did as much as leave his blood on the floor in her house because she missed him so much. So gross. She was so desperate that she actually used a medium to communicate with Travis. And then she ended up getting another chimp essentially. I need to cut in on the medium.

Like if you're a medium, that's such a jackpot. Because I don't really believe in him. And it's just like, he's making monkey noises to the... He says he wants a happy meal. She's like, oh, tell him I love him. That's him. That's the guy. The craziest part of all of this for me is that Sandy says she wants another chimp.

So she gives Pam Roseir, who we met, she's the chimp trainer, we met her in episode one. She gives Pam Roseair $20,000 to help Pam buy a chimp baby. And they actually name this baby chance, because it's kind of like it's Sandy's second chance at having a chimp. And Sandy makes regular visits to see him, but she actually ends up dying of an aortic aneurysm, which is like pretty close to a death from a broken heart. You know, it's like the old Padma special. Yeah, exactly. A Rolling Stone article comes out that reveals Dwayne's connection to Eric Good and Tiger King and that they were the ones that outed Tanya and Tanya stops talking to Dwayne, stops taking his text,

stopped communicating with them, completely cuts him off. We then have a check-in with Tanka at Save the Chimps and upon arrival he was put into a quarantine enclosure and they learned that he did not have congestive heart failure. He was overweight and he needed to be on a better diet. But aside from that, he was a relatively okay chimp. What about his puffy hands? That was just him being overweight, just being a puffy, beefy guy. That was the most like pseudo-medical thing ever.

Like, oh, his hands are puffy. He's about to die. After he's quarantined for 90 days, he's released into the main population. This place is amazing. There's 150 acres. There's 12 islands. Each of these islands have groups of like 13 to 23 social chimps. So they're really getting the kind of social interaction that they need.

And this, I'm just taking a quick sidebar here. Chimps in the wild operate in what we call a fission fusion society. So they have these really dynamic societies where you constantly have new chimps coming in and other chimps kind of breaking off to form these smaller family groups. And it's really complex. And you can't have anything that even approximates that unless you have larger groups like this. They don't get that from humans. They don't get that from four other chimps in captivity.

This is like the closest they can get to that in captivity. So it's really good that tonka has that now. That's going to help him be a much more well-adjusted chimpanzee. All right. Then we get a closer look at Pam Roseair, her chimpanzees. So Chance and some of the other ones she has at her house. Tanya actually immediately forgives Dwayne and then tells him that Eric Goetz's mom was a prostitute. He does.

He does. When it's funny, the moment's funny. The moment's funny because Dwayne's on speaker and Eric's sitting there listening to her say it. She then does agree to continue participating in the documentary, duh. And she does an interview with Eric where she says she was never actually planning on euthanizing Tonka. She was thinking about running away with him to Mexico. Getting a coyote. She's never driven into Mexico.

And then getting some Mexicans to help her with him. I would have ran to Mexico. I would have had coyotes get me across the border with Tonka. and me and Tonka would have lived in Mexico. The rest of our lives, I just build him a cage there and just get me a little verand and get me some Mexicans to help me. And there we go. Then we go back to Pam, and Pam's actually lost chance.

He's died at 15 years old. It was really unexpected. He just keeled over, and she's crying, and she's pleading for help to find a new chimp baby. Then we jump forward a little bit. Ten months after Tonka has taken, Tanya's order to pay PETA's legal fees of $225,000, which she can't afford.

So Pete actually offers her a deal. They say they'll let Tanya out of paying these legal fees if she agrees to leave the animal trade and exhibition business. And she immediately turns it down. She laughs and says, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not doing that. She's mad. Which makes me feel like she doesn't understand this whole thing.

Like that was what they wanted to take from her. They're not going to get that back to her. So then Tanya calls Dwayne. And the second he answers, she says, I fucked up. And then she reveals that she visited a friend who had a chimp. She got into that chimp's enclosure and that chimp attacked her. Her arm was dislocated. The tip of her ear was bitten off.

And she had bites on her hands, arms, and legs. And then in one of the closing scenes of the documentary, we hear Tanya talking about how she's having nightmares from this terrible encounter with this chimpanzee. Every time I go to sleep, I have nightmares over the situation. but ask me today if I would own a chimp or if I'd own a capuchin or if I'd own any kind of primate that could potentially do that to me 100% yes and then in the same breath she says she wants to buy an island where she can do the same thing as save the chimps but she will live with her chimpanzees and orangutans and gorillas so it doesn't seem like tanya has learned her lesson

All right, that's how it ends. I thought it was an incredible ending because you kind of expect to see these people learn from their mistakes and learn that this isn't an animal that's easy to care for or have as part of your family. And we see repeated throughout this episode that that's not the case. Like the worst possible things can happen and they continue to want to own a chimpanzee.

So for me, it really felt like a predominant. theme in this episode and throughout the whole series is obsession and this obsession with owning primates and specifically chimpanzees you know sandy was so obsessed that she had her friend's face get ripped off and she still wanted another chimpanzee yeah that Oprah clip like i forgot how insane of a moment that was and just crazy i remember it being a big deal when she went on opra but then like you cut back to sandy you're like this lady probably feels so bad about it And it's like, oh, wait, she's like buying another chimpanzee. And like, she has a quote where she says she would do it all over again.

I know. After having her friend completely be torn up and almost killed by a chimp, Sandy went out one year later and bought herself another chimp. It's insane when you think about it. It's insane. I got so exasperated watching it because she just said it was a freak accident. And it's like, this was not an accident. This was a ticking time bomb, like was said before.

And maybe there is some recordings out there of Sandy saying how bad she felt about Charla. But we never heard her say sorry. We never got her feelings about her friend. Supposedly her friend that got messed up for life, like disfigured horribly forever. I got pretty angry, if I'm being honest. It was really, really upsetting to hear. Yeah. It's really sad to see someone struggle with like such a crazy loss because I know Sandy did

feel like Travis was like part of her family. But at the same time, I felt the same way. Like, no remorse that we saw. And then her saying I would do it all over again. Like, imagine you're Charlotte Nash hearing that. And you've lost your face and you've lost, you know, your life is completely altered for the rest of your life because of this person who made a really irresponsible decision. Yeah, it's wild. And then Tanya's another side of the coin where she is going to go bankrupt. She's probably going to lose her family. She's completely destroying her life over this obsession with chimpanzees. And I just feel like that's a thread that we've followed for a while.

And I'm just curious, why do you guys think this obsession is so strong with this particular animal? What struck me this time was hearing Tanya at the beginning talk about how she has no doubt that Tanka is more loyal to her than even her husband. And it makes me wonder if other people's agency frightens her because you can't really control other humans. Like you can kind of control this chimp. So I think it's just someone you know isn't going around, carousing out on the town, sleeping around, stuff like that. Yeah. I don't know. She might, I don't know.

Her stuff with her husband's weird. Like she also said, unprompted, she said she'd give up her marriage for Tonka back. For Tonka. And it's just like, no one. No one's asking you that. I would give anything that I had possession-wise up for that child. I would give my life for him. And that's exactly what I did.

Yeah, a thing that really, like, resonated with me too. And, you know, none of us are experts on any of this. None of us are psychologists or can explain what's happening in these people's heads. But something that I felt throughout this is how maternal a lot of these relationships feel. and they even talk about it, about how they're their moms, and they're their kids, like the chimpanzee are their kids, and they can shape them into whatever they want to do. And, like, they'll never leave them.

They'll never hurt them. They're always going to be there for them. And it's so crazy for me how tight those ties are with this animal, though, that they cannot get over it. So it's fascinating. I think another part of the equation, too, is that these people are benefiting from having chimps in a lot of ways, Like Pam, she puts on her little circus

and she's financially benefiting from having them. And she talks about how they're better off in my care than at these sanctuaries. She even says something like they don't like being around mosquitoes or in the rain. My chimp's have been to the White House. And it's like, okay. Like, do they really care? Is that something that they acknowledge and actually care about? I mean, Chance did do a flip when he saw himself with Leah.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. But the thing is, though, they keep talking about all this love and how these are basically their kids, their human zes, and they prefer their human side even, is I think Tanya says that. But all the while, you see Pam with her chimp and chances on a leash the whole time. And it's like, I don't see a lot of truly genuinely loving moms with like just sitting on the couch in the house with their children on a leash, like pulling them around and yelling at them and stuff. Or a shock caller or something like that. Well, and like, it's shown, like, they sell animals for a lot of money. Connie was selling chimps for $65,000.

Tanya is selling a lot of different types of animals. She has her zoo where there's a clip where she's, like, telling someone holding a baby monkey. Or no, she was holding a baby sloth, which I know is like a bad animal to have as a baby. It's not very ethical. It stresses them out. And she's saying, like, we're going to have new babies here every week or two. So if you keep coming back, we'll have like new babies for you. So there always be baby monkeys, baby, wallabies, baby, everything.

We'll always have a baby of different types. So just because you had a baby this week doesn't mean it'll be the same baby. I'm glad you noted that. And there's like a lot of history of people doing that for profit that's really dark and bad for the animals. Yeah. Yeah, because they grow up. They don't stay as babies forever. And so when they grow up, where do they go?

They go to these really dingy sanctuaries. or they go, like, they get shot by the police. There's all sorts of things that happen to them because the person can't handle them anymore. Yeah, not to sloth, probably. Help my sloth. The police don't get one. Shoot in.

Yeah. I think these are all really good points, and it brings up something else that I wanted to talk about, was this stark contrast we get when we finally get to see Save the Chimps and their actual sanctuary, and we see these beautiful islands with all these different kind of play,

enclosures for the chimpanzees, social groups, experts, they're not getting handled by people. There's just a whole different level of professionalism that we see on display. And it really made me think about, you know, how chimps are socialized and how important it is for them to be around other animals in an environment that's mentally challenging for them. Do you think after having lived around humans and in captivity for so long, would a chimpanzee be able to re-adapt to a more natural life that it would have led? Or would it like those habits and dispositions stayed with him even after having gotten moved to a better place? I think a lot of it will stay with him, but that's like that's what these people at the sanctuary are going to do,

is they're going to work to break those habits and to make him be more socialized with chimpanzees over humans. But there's research out there that shows that wild caught chimpanzees that are taken into captivity have a really hard time than re-socializing with chimpanzees but captive-bred chimpanzees that are taken and like put in the entertainment industry and everything when they're put in these sanctuaries they have a slightly easier time breaking those bonds with humans and and re-socializing with chimpanzees interesting yeah tonka's like 38 so i do question like that's a long time to be in captivity and be given like attention from humans and you know i'm sure that he's not going to like healthy food as much as happy meals and like it's going to be like an adjustment you know for sure but it will be good for him and it will be good for his health and for his mental health too one thing that was really interesting to me was how pam was talking about her chimpanzees having learned to enjoy performing and entertaining i'm not maybe you could talk to that a little bit more west like is that something that an animal can learn to enjoy like the act of performing for performing sake or is it really just the reward that they get for performing that's yeah see that's yeah see that's

the catch right there what you just said is that to train those animals into that behavior there's always going to be a reward associated it's almost always positive reinforcement that they use to train up like an animal like a chimpanzee to do that kind of behavior and so it's impossible for us to say yes chance really just enjoys performing because they do have this associated reward with that and you know it's possible that he does but that is us answerpormorting That's us taking something that we see is like, oh, he's smiling or he's flipping around and being happy as like a really human kind of characteristic of joy. And for that animal, it might just be, this is what I have to do to get my reward or this is what I have to do to go back in my enclosure and see my friends. Yeah.

You know? Right. And it's really interesting because there's actually something I learned about recently. A lot of times people with primates, you'll see them doing these. like smiles when the people are touching them and stuff. And the people say, oh, you know, he's smiling. Look how happy he is. And that's actually the monkey showing how aggravated and stressed out it is by bearing

its teeth. And we see it as smiling. So we can really twist things by anthropomorphizing. And that's why it gets so dangerous. And you definitely see it on full display here. These owners are saying that their chimps are more happy with them in their little diapers in their tiny houses. but then we see time and time again stuff like Buck and Travis that shows that they're actually not that happy.

And this isn't a great path for a chimpanzee. Tonka didn't seem very happy in his little basement cage to me. I think, too, they probably do have an argument for chimpanzees that are really accustomed to human attention, like still wanting that attention from human and interactions. but like that just encourages more babies to be bought more like of this cycle to happen which we can clearly see isn't a healthy cycle but like we were in Borneo there's an orangutan sanctuary and they had one orangutan that had been in captivity and it would lay on the ground and hug itself because it wanted one of the caretakers to come hug it right it is going to be harder to like

get these primates with so much human attention to not have that anymore. But I think the alternative is just cages and bad situations. But it did kind of make me wonder. Depression too. Are these chimpanzees in these people's houses treated much worse than a dog? Yeah, but the difference is like dogs over centuries, over millennia, we've domesticated. We've made them part of our social group. So a dog literally sees you as part of its social group, and that's something that's in their genetics now.

A trained chimpanzee is it's trained, but it's not domesticated. It's very different. So it doesn't have that hardwired response to be part of a social group with a human. And something that I think is really important to note too is, you know, like I mentioned earlier, in the wild chimpanzees exist in these societies with lots of animals. So if one of those animals dies, it still has all these other social groups. connections to kind of rely on and that bring it you know joy and happiness and everything and fulfillment if a human being makes that that chimpanzee it's only connection like say

tanya and tonka or sandy and travis or sandy and her husband and travis tamara and buck and then their main person dies like sandy's husband that animal immediately becomes very depressed very they have hard to predict all these things happen to it because it a big part of its social world has been removed from it. And you can't give them that kind of connection outside of them interacting with other chimpanzees. And I think that's a really important thing to remember. I have a question for you guys. What did you think of like PETA charging or like charging her full lawyer fees?

I liked it. I came into this documentary not liking PETA because I just feel like I'd kind of seen their more misguided campaigns in my opinion. and I really liked them in this context. And I think it was a way to kind of try and back Tanya into a corner where they could get her to agree to agree to stop doing any of this. And that's not the way it went, but I feel like it was a good tactic. I thought it was too extreme until like she got the notice like we'll drop all charges if you just agree to stop exploiting animals. And I was like, yeah, no, that's fair. Right.

I think, again, I'm not, I'm never, I'm not on Tanya's side. I just want to make that clear up front. It is a big ask to basically take someone's livelihood and be like, you can't do that anymore. And I'm not excusing Tanya for like balking at that. It's harder said than done to just be like, okay, I'm done with animals then. That was how she made her living. And as far as Pita goes, I said in episode one, I didn't quite know where to land as far as Pete is concerned in the grander scheme of things.

in this documentary, I feel like they were pretty much 100% in the right for what they did. But I also recognize some of the tactics that they were employing against Tanya as some tactics. I've done some research since, and I've found some pretty upsetting things that Pita has done more than just like the shock campaigns. So I'm not going to endorse Pita wholeheartedly. But in this situation, I feel like they did the right thing and the right result was reached. Yeah, that's how I feel too. I don't think I'll ever be able to like back Pita as an organization. Yeah.

But I do think they have some fights that are really noble. And this seemed like one of them. And like sometimes you do have to be able or like be too extreme to get results, you know? Sure. All right. Well, before we get to a couple last little things, I just wanted to know if there's any other quick moments you guys wanted to call out from this episode. I want to share a quote from the funeral. Is it Pam or Pamela?

Pam. I know the one you're going to say. So Pam, in this speech, says, God bless God for giving him to me. Incredible stuff. And God bless God for giving it to me. So I just wanted to maybe break that down. Can God bless God, you think? He's all powerful.

Like, he probably appreciates that, right? He's like, oh, well, thanks. It reminds me of the meme where Barack Obama is putting the metal over. Barack Obama's neck. Have you seen that? Yeah. One thing I, just the very end, I thought, was such a special moment. A beautiful microcosm of the kind of person, Tanya's, when she's talking about the little island she's going to buy and move on to with all the chimps. And she's like, and we're going to color together. And we're going to eat lunch together. And it's like, what are you talking about? You're like

limping around. Your arm is out of its socket. Your ear got ripped off. And you're like, no, we're just going to, we're going to get some coloring books together. I just like, I stood up and like had to pace around the room. All right. Well, just to wrap this up, I want your guys final takeaways from the whole documentary from chimp crazy. Mostly what I want is your thoughts on how we feel about these people, how we feel about Tanya and them keeping chimps in captivity. For me, it's just an exhibition of selfish love. And the line I keep going back to from episode one.

And she genuinely seemed to love chimps. It's just, I guess we have different definitions of what love is. I guess they just have a different definition of what love is. And it's abuse and they're disguising it as affection, whether they know it or not. And it's for them. It's for the humans. And it's not for the chimps. Yeah, I'd agree with that.

I thought the documentary was a lot of fun. I learned a ton. The Travis story, like, I was so blown away that she kind of got another chimp. Not even a year later, like, that just blew my mind, especially when you see your friend's face. And yeah, I mean, what a ride. Yeah, I agree. I think it was some of the most fun I ever had watching a documentary. And I think I felt the same way.

I think throughout this, we've kind of talked about three different things when it comes to ownership. And one is obsession and addiction. one is attention grabbing, which Jeff, you brought up multiple times that these people really like attention. And then I think another one is maternal love. And so it's really hard for me just to judge them outright and say like, you know, this is awful because I do, my heart does kind of go out to some of these people that just really want an animal that loves them and feels like it's capable of giving the love back that they want to give it. but I have a dog that I love more than anything probably on this earth and that I feel that love back from a dog and that's an animal that's been domesticated

and that we can have in our homes in an ethical good way and there's lots of dogs out there that need homes so go get a dog that's my final take home get a dog or get a cat good advice because these are animals that don't belong in our societies yeah all right well great guys this is really fun I'm glad we got to do this together and I'm excited to talk to the

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Terms apply. All right, so we are back with our interview portion of episode four. Once again, I'm joined by director Eric Good. Hi, Wes. And executive producer Jeremy McBride. Hi, Wes. Hey, guys. So we start this episode pretty much with a police raid.

And we see these law enforcement officials entering Tanya's home. And they're there to start the process of removing Tanya's home. from the home. And she's talking to Dwayne in this moment. And I felt this feeling that maybe it was almost like she was testing the water with him. Did you guys, do you guys feel like Tanya knew that it was the film crew or do you think that that came as a revelation much later? Well, not much later. But I think she wasn't sure, which is kind of unbelievable. But I think strangely, I don't think she do? Eric, I kind of have a slightly kind of different perspective just because of what that footage

showed us and shows the audience in that moment, starting with Justin's nonverbal reaction to Dwayne as he's kind of trying to bring some levity in this situation, kind of looking at him side-eyed with question. For us, it's kind of open for interpretation. Like in her heart, maybe she didn't believe that he could have possibly done that to her. Yeah. So it's kind of one of those situations. where I think she was very suspicious, but the problem is, as you know, Tanya told a lot of people.

I think she wanted Dwayne to divulge. It was him or us. So I'm not saying she didn't suspect us, but I don't think she knew. Now, the backstory that's so interesting, you know, what technically happened on that day was she was served, I don't know the technical legal term, but this information saying that she's going to have to respond to this in a way. of dealing with the confiscation. U.S. Marshals are going to be there. They're going to confiscate Tonka. So going into it, and us, Eric and I kind of talking to Dwayne through this, like, hey, she's going to know.

There's no reason why she wouldn't know because if she just read the legal documents that were delivered to her that served as a basis for them to get Tonka, she would know for sure. So why is she inviting you? So our question then became, are you walking into a trap, literally?

Are you going into a situation? being baited in, and is she going to harm you? I don't know. What could possibly happen? All these scenarios that we're working through in our head. Well, Jeremy, there are some people in this world that don't read. Fair enough. Yeah.

That's fair. Yeah. We were like just totally dumbfounded. We couldn't believe that, you know, she didn't know. Eric, on that same note, you know, after Tanya does indeed learn that it was Dwayne and it was the film crew and everything, you finally get the chance to meet her face to face. And I'm curious what that was like for you to finally get to meet Tanya and have this face-to-face interview with her. Listen, I was very surprised that she, one, was willing to meet with me.

Yeah, I thought that she would have at least if she met with me, you know, really confronted me about not being transparent from the beginning. And I didn't even actually explain to her why I wasn't transparent. She didn't even ask. It was just a relief for me to connect with her on a very human level. And so, you know, it was a relief. But all along, of course, I was scratching my head as to why she would talk to me. Yeah. And I'm glad we see that moment.

For all, you know, some flaws that we've seen, Tanya does seem very quick to also forgive Dwayne. You know, it takes like a few moments for her to pretty much say, I know, I understand. It's okay. We see in this episode that because of this long legal struggle and obvious evidence then that Tonka's alive, Pita then says, hey, we're going to make Tonya pay our legal fees. Or Tanya can get completely out of this trade. She can stop keeping, breeding, selling animals, and we're able to kind of let her go scot-free. And she immediately dismisses that out of hand. And I'm curious if you know, has there been any kind of resolution to that?

that struggle since you guys stopped filming? Well, I'd start by saying this. In this episode, a lot happens to Tanya. She loses her best friend, is betrayed by someone she really liked, is on crutches, she got her foot run over. Attacked by a chimp. Attacked by a chimpanzee.

She is broke. All of her money is being poured into the zoo. And despite all of that adversity, she sees a way out and decides to go the other way and fight it. And you kind of realize what's at stake and what's important to her. And they're basically saying, as she says so well, in the episode, you know, this is, they're trying to take my life away. And that's such a hard thing for us with the PETA case.

You know, on one hand, there's this private organization dictating and maneuvering without really playing by the rules. And so that always was a hard thing. Like, is enough is enough? You got the animal back. Why now ruin this person's life? So it's a hard one. You know, it's a hard one to have that context to understand what this person's been going through.

They've gotten everything they want and now they want to make it worse for her. That's something that we kind of struggled with a lot. You know, look, I think that when you meet Tanya and you realize, you know, the human factor in this story, the problem is no one from people, Kina has really met Tanya or tried to understand Tanya. I just hope there's a silver lining in this documentary series for Tanya. I just would love to see her give up the monkey peddling business and try to find peace and just taking care of maybe a group of animals well and running a small zoo on her property would be a nice compromise

rather than pimping out baby primates as she does. I think that, you know, deep down, Tanya knows that it's kind of a horrible business. Yeah, we just, there's a lot there to talk about. And I think, you know, what you said, Jeremy about Pita and their kind of singular mission and whether it's too far to, you know, push her that much. I think that was my first knee-jerk reaction, but then also seeing her immediately turn it down and remembering the shots of Tanka in his enclosure in her basement and thinking, you know what, this is someone who probably shouldn't be doing this and really who should be doing this outside of zoos or education systems or, you know, whoever is able to keep these

animals in an ethical way. And I think the other thing that we just touched on that I definitely wanted to talk more about is that this almost seems like an addiction for her. Your closing scene where she shows up and says, hey, I just got attacked. And then in the same breath says, I'm thinking about buying an island where I can live with these animals. It's like someone fiending for their next kind of fix almost. Yeah, I mean, it's like you say, we could have saved her, you know, from the fate of a chimp killing her, you know, or effectively an overdose, right? It is like an addiction. And she's playing with with fire. And so part of me feels like, you know, we did something virtuous, not only for Potaka, but maybe even saving Tanya's life. You know, I mean,

of course, she doesn't see it that way. Yeah. Well, we do know she's a rule breaker too. So I'm curious, even if they had have stuck her with, you know, that injunction and saying, you can't do this. I'm pretty sure she still would. Yeah. Yeah, that's for sure. I also think, you know, West, the addiction thing, of course, going back to it, I think there's a love blindness to it, you know, that is real. And what would one do for love? It makes you do crazy. things. You've heard that expression used a lot before. I think this is no different than an extreme form of that. And we see it expressed very dramatically in Sandy's, Sandy's story and obviously Pam's story. What do they want to do after their son's gone? They want to get another.

Yeah, this is a love story for four women. And, you know, Pam Roseira says Sandy Harold, you know, died from heartbreak, right? Yeah. And I think I think those are really beautiful sentiments and I agree that it's a love story. To play devil's advocate a tiny bit, something that really resonated with me was when you do hear Sandy talking about her whole experience and how terrible it was and she says, but I do it all over again. And meanwhile, Charlotte Nash is missing her face. You know, it's horrific, the injuries that were inflicted on her. And then it's horrific what these animals had to live through too, you know, like Travis was essentially a prisoner and Tonka was a prisoner. Personally, I really appreciated that we have that

perspective and that we do feel sorry for these women that have invested that much care into these animals. But I think you also did a really good job of showing that ultimately it's misplaced because it is impossible to give this animal what it needs in a private captive environment. It just is impossible. And so I struggle to think of like a fix for this sort of thing. It doesn't seem like there's an easy way to help someone that their addiction is a chimpanzee. Yeah, I have to say I agree. And I'm not one to say that people can't keep responsibly some animals in captivity. I think that you can do that.

But I think it's awfully hard with a chimpanzee to give a chimp the quality of life that a chimpanzee needs. I think one of the common threads between all four women, is that none of them probably have seen chimpanzees in the wild and seen how chimpanzees should live. Maybe a light bulb would go off and she would recognize maybe, you know, maybe like what she's really doing. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think having covered a number of instances of people keeping animals in captivity and seeing it go wrong, I do think often those people have this need to have the animal give something.

back to them. There needs to be this reciprocal kind of relationship where just observing it in the wild isn't enough for those people often. They have to, they want to touch. They want to feel an emotional connection. There has to be that whole thing. And I would love to also see that. I'd love to see if maybe Tanya seeing these animals happy in the wild might help to remove that and make her feel like, oh, this is enough for me. I can appreciate this animal as it's meant to be. And I, you know, we've talked a bit about anthropomorphizing. And there's this part in this episode specifically where Pam says that her animals are happy because they get to see the White House and they don't have mosquitoes and they live like millionaires. And it's a really interesting moment because, you know, for captive chimps, she probably does have some of the happiest captive chimps.

But after talking to Craig and learning about it, he brought up this really good comparison of like, that is an animal. like he said that is essentially was raised by aliens and has learned how to be happy as an alien but never really gets to express itself as a chimpanzee and that does seem to be lost on some of these subjects in your documentary yeah and there's things that we don't speak about too much which is you know these chimps pam rosaires you know they're they're castrated they're they can't be chips right they they do things to these chimps be able to work with them. Yeah, their fangs are removed, right?

Their canines are removed. So there's some dirty little secrets to be able to break and manage a champ in a circus. Yeah. For me, going kind of full circle here, and I think you do this really well again in the film, is we get this amazing moment where Alan coming, who we've been following throughout this. And I have to admit, it's just amazing throughout the entire thing. How sympathetic he is to your characters and how.

But isn't it fair, though, Wes? because he kind of has the same sickness. He has the same feelings. He does. Yeah. And I think it's amazing to see that and to see him kind of throughout this journey. And we get this incredible moment where he finally goes to save the chimps in Florida. And it's this stark contrast between Tonka in a cage in a basement. And for you personally having been on this journey for years, how did both of you kind of emotionally resonate with that, with seeing that footage and seeing Tonka in his sanctuary in Florida. Well, for me at first, I wasn't sure. You know, I thought, you know, maybe Tanka misses television and misses happy meals and misses whipped cream and cake. But I think the more I learned,

I realized that more than all of those things, being with other chimps, being able to socialize and groom with other chimps and having that relationship with other chimps at Save the Chips trumps everything. It breaks through in the footage to West. I mean, it's a closest approximate environment for Tonka to be successful in. And he's on a three-acre island with 18 other chimps. But we would get these live feed updates from the team at Save the Chimps over the course of this journey that would really indicate to us his acclamation.

him opening up, him being social, him responding to this environment in such a really unique way is also his condition. He got healthier. His hair started growing back, as you may have noticed, around his face and darkened. So by all accounts, he's happy being a chimp. Yeah. All right. So for the second part of today's interview portion, we're going to be talking with Carl Safina. Carl is an author, an ecologist, and professor of nature. And professor of nature. and humanity at Stony Brook State University of New York. Carl, thank you for joining us today. Really a pleasure.

So Carl, throughout this series, we've been seeing a lot of captive chimpanzees, people that have formed relationships with these animals. And I was hoping quickly you could just describe to the audience basically what is anthropomorphism, why it's often seen as a negative thing, and why it's potentially a dangerous thing when you're dealing with captive primates like a chimpanzee. Okay, well, anthropomorphism is attributing human thoughts and emotions to non-humans. However, I do want to point out that to me, the key word is attributing because there are non-humans that have thoughts and emotions

and deep and complex social and emotional and psychic lives. So in a way, to me, I don't think that the key issue here with the, chimpanzees is one of anthropomorphism. I think the key issue is a mismatch between how the people who are keeping them think it's okay to keep them versus what a chimpanzee with their mental and emotional complexities and their social needs really require to be psychologically fit, to live the life that they are born to live. And in my opinion, I don't even think it's an opinion. I think it's fairly obvious. Those needs cannot be met in captive situations for chimpanzees. Yeah, I know we talked with Craig Stanford a bit, who's a primatologist, and he brought up that with chimpanzees, there may be

the animal that's closest to us and that we can anthropomorphize best with because they are so similar to humans, and there is kind of this overlap in our attitudes and even kind of our intelligence and whatnot. I know in this series we see a lot of interpretation about how these animals are feeling and what they're going through by these owners. And I'm curious from your professional view, how are we actually able to interpret what animals are feeling and what they're experiencing? Yeah, well, as I said, I think the key thing there is attribution. If you observe, something. And so the caveat there is you need to be a good observer. You need to be objective. You need to have some sort of basis and background and context for understanding what animals

that are not human beings are experiencing. With other animals, though, you know, you can simply see that many of them act frightened in situations that are threatening. They may act confident or affectionate in situations where they are in a place they know well or with other individuals who are their mates or their offspring or members of their social group. You know, it's very reasonable to interpret what they are probably experiencing by the logic of their behaviors and the logic of their context. As far as the second part of the question about what the people who are keeping them, are saying that they are experiencing. You know, they're asserting, I guess I might say, that they're doing well and that they're okay. Their version of love, you know, love, of course,

takes many, many forms that are sometimes self-serving. There are some that are self-less. I think that if you claim to love something, it has to sort of pass the test of, does it really want to be there with you and are you open to the possibility that what you are doing with it and for it is not the best and is not in its best self-interest. So on the on the flip side of that, a few of the subjects in the film really assert that these chimpanzees are essentially humanzies. They use that term even a couple times where they say they've been raised with humans to such a level that they don't even know how to really be a chimpanzee anymore. And I'm curious from your professional perspective, is that true? Can these animals be

reintegrated into chimpanzees societies? Or is that damage done? And it's kind of impossible for them to become chimpanzees again? Ah, well, there's chimpanzees and there's chimpanzees. So if you're talking about wild chimpanzees, they can never be integrated into chimpanzee society. Because for one thing, chimpanzees learn almost everything culturally. We're, we're, we're, you're, do you go? What do you do? How do you show respect to higher ranking individuals? Where's the food? Where's the water? The big problem with chimpanzees is that they are socially not suited to live in nuclear-type families with people. So chimpanzees live in hierarchical groups where, especially for males, dominance and seeking high rank is pretty much everything for them,

and they win their rank in violent fights, which is very different than something like an elephant or a sperm whale or a wolf that achieves its rank by age. So chimpanzees get to a point where they are compelled to try to be dominant over everybody, and they achieve that dominance, by fighting violently and overthrowing the existing dominant individual. Wolves, on the other hand, which are the ancestors of all dogs, they live in nuclear families. But that's a difference between a creature that is evolved and then domesticated, they are genetically changed from wolves.

They differ in very important ways that let them be really well suited to living with people. Chimpanzees have none of that at all. Yeah, I do think that's something that is maybe lost on a lot of these people that do raise these animals and something we've talked about a bit in these interviews is that this is a process that takes a lot of time to remove those kind of wilder parts of an animal that's domesticated. And I wanted to open it up, Jeremy and Eric, if either of you have any questions you wanted to bring up with Carl, I wanted to give you time for that. I mean, I think I have so many questions, but I really like what you just said, Carl.

What would you say to someone, if you had the opportunity, someone like Tanya, about this love that she professes to have for this chimpanzee talk up? She says, he's not a chimp. He's a humanzy. He's imprinted. He's like us. He's caught between two worlds. What would you say to her about that love? Well, at that point, they are caught between two worlds. and that's because that love has been either damaging as love or they've been damaged by the total lack of care and conscience that allowed people to bring wild baby chimpanzees into captivity to begin with or to breed them and sell them as property. They're not an object.

These creatures really should be given the chance to live the life that they were born to live. And if you really, really want contact, which I do understand, the best way to get that is in Wildlife Rescue Center. And then there are also these sanctuaries in the U.S., which they really are sanctuaries. They attempt to create the kind of physical freedom and social complexity that chimpanzees need, but they can be given a much more humane retirement than living in what is essentially a prison and being considered property. My question is more about multi-generational influences, I would say, about the creation of anthropomorphic animal characters that you see created by the likes of Disney or what you see in children's books. You know, I have two young boys.

And I think a lot about, we talk a lot about the animal characters in the books and the animal characters in the movies. And I think about, you know, some of our subjects in our documentary series and their influences growing up that got them into these places they're out. in life today. Just a curiosity that I would love to hear your thoughts on just these, the world of influences in an anthropomorphic way with animals and how that impacts our youth and how to navigate, honestly. Not easy has no real answer that is the truth with a capital T. It's nuanced, in my opinion. And I would say that there are some, there are many times where, where animals have been fictionalized to sort of stand in for human characters, you know, telling stories about being industrious or lazy by having a fox or an ant or a grasshopper.

It seems to me like a very useful way to probe the human psyche by creating these non-human characters as stand-ins. I think for a young person, it can form a bridge between, a totally human world and a world that is populated with other beings. I don't think it's necessarily a harmful thing. I will point out one thing that occurred to me. I wrote an opinion piece a few years ago about Hugh Lofting, and he is the guy that created the Dr. Doolittle series of stories. Why he did that is very touching. He was in World War I. He couldn't stand what he saw happening to the animals that they had in the trenches and in battle, the horses and things like that, getting blown to bits and injured.

But he wanted to write home to his children and not tell him about all the terrible things he was seeing. So he made these stories about somebody who could talk to the animals. And in a way, that's wonderful. But it occurred to me that that's what we always are trying to do, is talk to the animals when really what we need to do is listen. Yeah. That's beautiful. Thank you, by the way.

I just want to ask one more thing if I could, Wes. Yeah. You know, in this documentary call, we're dealing with a real person, Tanya. And right now we're actually very concerned about her well-being because, you know, we played a role in making sure this chimp was placed in a sanctuary. But you're talking about Tanya's well-being, right? Yeah, Tanya's well-being. Yeah. Yeah, because we were obviously very concerned about Tanka's

well-being. And we're hoping that there's a silver lining in this for her somehow that she, you know, not that she'll have an epiphany, but maybe she'll start to realize that this was a one-sided love affair between her and Tanka. What would you say to someone like Tanya to maybe try to make her understand what that relationship is that she has between Tanka and her? Well, obviously, that relationship for her and for some of the people more or less like her is very, very strong and very deep and hugely important to them. And she said, quote, they're your babies, unquote, and quote, pita has no empathy for the person or the love they have and then what do we see we see a bunch of cops right

and it's a raid well there's obviously no trust offered there at all there's no counseling of any kind there's no attempt to be friends and i think that that could be handled much much better if people cared not only about the welfare of the chimps, but also about the welfare of people who are so, so deeply invested in them, and, you know, fairly obviously have other issues and gaps in their lives. Yeah, I had another question that kind of builds off that a bit. And something you said earlier resonated with me about that want and that desire to be close to these animals. And I'm a wildlife biologist, I think my best days had been when I get to handle a grizzly bear or I get to, you know, be close to an animal that's that powerful and amazing. And I'm curious, in your opinion,

what is it about the human condition that draws us to wild animals and these animals that are so much more powerful than us in so many different ways? What is it about us deep down that that ignites that within us. Our entire biological history, we're the direct descendants of four billion years of evolution. Our minds, our brains, our psychology, all was built over tens of millions of years in an entirely natural setting. That is our habitat. And I don't think we're just drawn to the most powerful animals, although their power is,

literally awe-inspiring. I love to see all of these things. We love our gardens. We love a view of the water. We love nature because we are built to love nature and we suffer all the psychological ills of modernity because our psychology is not made for living the way that we have constructed a life for ourselves. Great. Yeah, I think that's really illuminating and, you know, a quick follow-up question that then would be how can people reform those kind of connections to nature? How can they, you know, kind of reawaken that part of their lives? What would your advice be for people that watch this series and feel the need to be in a more natural state? Yeah, well, first of all, just be in a more natural state because it is everywhere still and a lot of people don't see it.

You just have to look around a little bit. Somebody once said to me, I really want my kids to love nature. So we're going to Botswana. next summer. And I said, do you have a bird feeder? You know, because Botswana is not their real life. It's just a place they're going to go to and come home from. You put a bird feeder outside your kitchen window. Look at it every day. The birds will always be different in different seasons. You know, it's a little window on things. That's great. Thank you so much. Eric and Jeremy, if you guys don't have anything else, I think we'll wrap up with Carl. It's been a great interview. I've learned a lot. And yeah, we really appreciate your input on all of this. Thank you.

Thanks, Carl. Thank you, Carl. Well, I'm honored to be part of it. So thank you very much. And I do think the series is kind of mind-blowing. I just had like quite a series of holy shit moments. So thanks for sharing that with me. Thanks for being interested in my thoughts. And anytime you want to do it again, let me know. Thank you, Carl. All right. Well, before we go, Eric and Jeremy, I just wanted to give you guys one more chance to leave us with any parting thoughts on chimps in captivity, on Tanya, on the entire project, just anything you want to leave us with before we wrap this up, and we're finished with episode four. I guess I would say, you know, I think it might be important for people to know that chimpanzees are in the subfamily called hominens, which we are in that

same subfamily, humans, Homo sapiens. And so chimpanzees are closer to us than they are to any of the other great apes. They're closer to us than they are to, well, maybe not bonobos, but they're closer to us than they are guerrillas. And so we're effectively looking at ourselves. And when you think of evolution and where we come from, we're so closely related to chimps that they really deserve the respect that we probably are not giving them. And I would just say something that, you know, really the issue, the captive issue in the U.S. is kind of over. there's very few chimpanzees that we know of that are in captivity that remain. But it really, if you zoom out and you think about an individual's impact,

and you think about habitat loss and degradation, that's the real message is really wild populations of animals and the human impact to that and how we should all be a little bit more mindful of our actions. So I think a lot about that is our impact to wild populations of animals, especially in this case chimpanzees. Yeah, I definitely felt that. And I'm happy that you guys were able to put that conservation message into your work. And I just want to say from my perspective, I absolutely loved the documentary.

I thought not only was it a really fun watch, it was really informative. I learned a lot about a whole kind of sub-community that I didn't even know really existed. And I learned a lot about an animal that I think is really misunderstood. So I just wanted to say thank you. It was a true pleasure watching the documentary and talking with both of you. Thank you, Wes. Thank you, Wes. That's it for this episode.

Again, a really big thank you to our guests, Eric Good, Jeremy McBride, and Carl Safina. All four episodes of the HBO documentary Chimp Crazy are now available to stream on Max. Tooth and Clause hosted by Jeff Larson, Mike Smith, and myself, Wes Larson. It's produced by Mike Smith with additional production services provided by Pod People. Special thanks to Tina Wynne, Michael Gluckstatt, and Aaron Kelly at HBO.