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

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

This week Wes, Jeff and Mike discuss some of Tonia’s backstory, the case of Buck the chimpanzee in Pendleton, OR and their predictions for how this series will wrap up. Then Wes speaks with filmmakers Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride about some of the motivations people have for keeping chimpanzees privately, and they are later joined by Dr. Craig Stanford, professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC who explains the complex social lives and needs of chimpanzees.  Watch Episode Three of the HBO Documentary Series Chimp Crazy on Max.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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episode of this crazy docu series, plus talking with the filmmakers, some other experts to really get behind the scene details from each episode of Chimp Crazy. And like I mentioned, we're Tooth and Claw. I'm Wes Larson. I'm a wildlife biologist. And I'm joined today by my two co-hosts on Tooth and Claw, Jeff and Mike. You guys want to introduce yourselves? No.

Oh, what else is there to say? It's Jeff and Mike. That's all you need to know. Yep. All right. A quick spoiler warning for today. We're going to be talking about episode three. of Chimp Crazy. So if you haven't seen episodes 1, 2, or 3, go watch them and then come back

and listen to the podcast. All right, so we're going to do a quick recap of what happened in episode 3. We open on kind of an ominous body cam scene of law enforcement getting ready to shoot a chimpanzee in a backyard. We're then back in Lake of the Ozarks and Tanya's home, and we see Tanya playing with Tanka in the makeshift enclosure she's built in her basement. Tanya says that this chimp is indeed Tanka and that she violated. the court order because the sedation and journey to Florida would have killed Tonka. Meanwhile, the filmmakers are struggling with what to do because they're essentially witnesses to a chimpanzee kidnapping at this point.

And we're definitely going to be talking to them more in our interview portion to learn kind of what was going through their minds when all this was happening. We get a really good flashback where Tanya tells us how she got Tanka to Lake of the Ozarks and this amazing clip where like 20 times she says Tanka was dead on camera. And then she goes over how her and her husband sedated Tonka hoisted him and his cage into a room at the Holiday Inn just a few miles from that was insane. Yeah. That seemed like too heavy, first of all for both of them. And then just like the Holiday Inn just had the most out of it worker of all time.

To not notice a chimpanzee in the room. They then drive Tonka to sigh the chimp guy in Ohio. And he has a private collection of a lot of animals. He has tigers, chimpanzees. and Tonka's there for about six months. During that period, we get a look into size checkered past, where he brings up a history of using public funds to buy stuff like CPR dolls and snowy owls and wildebeests,

you know, just like a totally normal purchase history. You know what? People always spend like the money they get from crimes on boring stuff. He at least like did something. I'm like, okay, like I can see why this guy stole some money. He had some fun. Yeah, he went for it. For sure. He bought like five hot tubs.

So, Sai does something else really big to help out Tanya. In episode two, we showed Tanya producing some ashes to show Pita that she had cremated Tonka. Well, Sai had a chimp who had recently died. Ricky. They dug his chimp ass up and they cremated him. So Tanya could use those ashes to throw Pita off. So insane. So those were real ashes that we saw last time.

Real chimpanzee ashes. What the hell? It blew my mind. Because that last time I was like, that didn't. look like what I thought it would, but I was wrong. No. Yeah, it's funny. Like, PETA probably didn't even like take the time to test it or anything.

They're like, obviously these aren't Tonka's ashes. And then like, it's actually a chimpanzee's ashes. That was her best lie so far. Yeah. Yeah. She got us all. So Tanya then moves Tonka to the basement of her home. She keeps him a secret from everyone, even members of her family.

And then we get a really humanizing look into Tanya's life. At 19, she became a foster parent. she says that she's had approximately 75 foster children. A lot of those children had special needs, and she really gravitated toward those kids because they needed the most help. And then she ends up actually adopting one of these foster children, and she has a biological son. And when those children grew up, she got into the monkeys,

and they became her main focus, much more so than her kids even. There was an underlying feeling of just kind of feeling like, I don't want to say abandon, but definitely just feel like where do I fit into the picture? I love these chimps more than anything in the world, and I mean more than anything, more than my kids, more than anything. After that, we get into the story of Buck in Pendleton, Oregon. And Buck was a chimpanzee owned by Tamara Brigotti,

and he was a local celebrity in this small western town. A lot of his story in the dock is told by Jamie Bennett, who is essentially his nanny, and then Beau Wade, who is Tamara's son. We're going to condense this quickly, but Buck was a chimpanzee that was really cute and playful as a baby and then became dangerous, really unpredictable, and moody as he grew older. And because of that, he was confined to this really dilapidated cage in a house. He had to wear a shock collar. It was just really poor conditions.

He was not socialized or anything. And Tamara also wasn't very socialized. She was a lonely, angry person with what seemed to be some pretty serious alcohol issues and not the ideal person to be taking care of an adult chimpanzee. So one day she actually called. the police when Buck violently attacked her daughter, the police arrive and they shoot Buck in the head. And that's what we saw at the beginning of this episode. We'll talk about that more in the second part of this recap. But we get to some clips of Tanya and her son talking about how Tanka is so socialized with humans that he can't be with other chimps in the sanctuary. Meanwhile, Pita's offering $10,000 for any information that will lead them to Tonka.

And then Alan Cumming actually matches that. So it's 20 grand. Tanya starts to know she's going to get caught at some point. she can see the writing on the wall and she actually calls Dwayne our proxy director and says that Tonka is sick and she's going to need to put him down. But Twain's been spending time with Tonka

so he knows like Tonka seems fine. So he immediately worries and he tells the filmmakers. At least not in like imminent danger of dying at least. He does have some health issues but Dwayne knows that this is more Tanya's escape plan. Yeah. Which like is crazy because she says that these are kids and she loves these chimpanzees more than her own son Justin.

So like Justin better watch out if she can get out of something within. Justin like doesn't wash the dishes one night. And Tony's like, I don't know. The crazy thing for me here, and we can get in this more, is that she would rather put Tonka down than surrender him to PETA. And part of that might be her legal trouble that she knows she's going to run into. But immediately the filmmakers wonder, you know, if she's going to kill Tonka just because of this legal pressure.

And because of this case study with Buck, they decide to intervene. And they show evidence to Jared Goodman at the end of the episode and PETA. And they show that Tonka is alive and that Tanya is planning on killing him. That's how the episode ends. Another crazy cliffhanger ending. And we'll get into that kind of what our predictions are for next time. Something I think we talk about a lot in this episode are these moral complexities of owning a chimp because it goes from something that's really cute and playful and cuddly into something very complex and dynamic and powerful.

So I'm definitely going to talk to the filmmakers, the primatologist about that, but I want to talk about it between the three of us too. What do you guys feel after watching this episode? How do you feel about people owning chimps? Yeah. I mean, there hasn't been a great example of it yet in the show. Of like someone that's doing it, right? It seems to me like it's more about the people than the animal. which is typically the case with pets,

but I think it's like a lot more so with chimpanzees. Like the chimpanzees just are not in a good situation. Totally. Ever. Yeah. It reminded me a little bit of some toxic and controlling relationships. Maybe there's an appeal that you can treat a being like that, that you get the fulfillment of having this surrogate child,

but you don't get any repercussions for treating it poorly. You can just shove it away in a closet for a day and kind of forget. And then, I don't know, it's just very abusive to me. Are you talking about my ex that kept me in her basement in the cage? Yeah, we promised we'd never talk about that. And only gave me high fives like once a day. They were good high fives. That's why you stuck around.

Showed you videos of other Jeff's. But Buck's nanny, Jamie, was talking about how Buck was a total victim in this relationship. And he was the one that paid the price for the human's bad decisions. It was a total one-way street relationship kind of thing. I believe that Buck is a victim of circumstance and he is a victim of humans. And I understand it is a beautiful baby that you feel so incredibly bonded to. And it is so strong and it is so loving. But it is so for you.

And it is at the expense of the ape. Totally. I think another part that was really interesting was Justin Tanya's son. He seems like really insightful. And he brings up a point where he says, Because they're essentially toddlers that live forever, they're always toddlers. They always need care. That's where the big attraction to these primates comes in.

They're like children that never grow up. So they're constantly going to need her care. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, that's the monkeys. And so like these primates are just like so fulfilling for her. I just think that's like such an interesting psychology. And like more than that, I think she needs something that like relies on her. Yeah, totally. Something that needs her care, needs her attention, needs her to like be in charge of them.

Yeah. Yeah. And we're maybe treading a little bit on dangerous ground now because none of us have kids and none of us will ever be mothers and really be able to tap into exactly what her psychology is. But it's obvious to me, I mean, both Tanya and Tamara's children. What was Tamara? Tamara. What was her son's name? Yeah, Bo.

It was Bo. So both Justin and Bo. both say in this episode, they loved these chimps more than they loved us. And I don't doubt that there's some kind of like form of love happening there. But it feels much more to me like this is an easier way to find that fulfillment of child rearing and like finding purpose. But without the baggage of it being a real human being. Right. Having its own, its own psychology and everything.

It seems like you can go like full mom mode on these chimps, you know. But I think I think. I think some of these women especially realize like how big of a trap that actually is because then they find out that these chimps as they get older actually do have their own personalities and their own like emotions and everything. And when they realize that, they suddenly realize they're too much for them to handle. For me, that's a really important part of this whole story is we see how bad this can go and how off the rails it often goes and how unprepared these owners often are for the

specific challenges of an adult chimpanzee. And I think we kind of see Tanya starting down that path with Tanka. Like she's realizing I'm in over my head. You see like she's not going in with Tanka. She's letting him reach through the gate and stuff. She seems a little scared of Tanka at times. Yeah, he's fucking huge. He's massive.

I'm scared of them. The scenes where he sticks his hands through and they're pulling on each other, I just think, man, if he wanted to, he could rip her arm off right now. But then on the other hand, I think in this episode, we also get this kind of compassionate view of Tanya and we see this human side of her and it's hard not to really empathize for someone who's raised 75 foster kids and who has that much love to give and feels especially strong about people that need even more kind of attention and whatnot. For me, it made me empathize a lot more with her. For Alan Cumming, it made him empathize more with her. How do you, how are you guys feeling about Tanya right now? I'm with, I'm with Alan where it's, it is easy to have empathy. for someone who does have so much love to give, like Tanya. But I empathize more with Tanka.

It's him who's really suffering here. And when she credited God as the catalyzing force that gave Tanka a stroke so that she could have the opportunity to keep him in her possession, I was like... Before Pita came and took the kids, Tanka had a massive stroke. I feel like God gave me that opportunity, and I just took advantage. I was like, okay, her mental gymnastics are that of someone who has completely lost it.

Now this is almost like... Simone Biles of mental gymnastics. Yeah, she's the Simone Biles of mental gymnastics. But like, she's crediting God for giving her quote unquote child a stroke so that she could keep it. That's just such a twisted form of logic to me. Yeah, I personally haven't had a lot of sympathy for Tanya yet. Like, I don't know.

She seems pretty well off financially after taking advantage of a lot of animals and like prospering from it. True. And she has a son who loves her a lot and the sun almost feels like, like I can almost see a little bit of hurt, I think, in him that like for sure. Animals more than him. Without a doubt. I don't know.

Yeah. I don't think you guys are wrong. At the same time, I can't help but really feel for her. I just feel like she has this obsession that it's really hard to fulfill that kind of obsession and it almost reminds me of someone who's like addicted to something and she knows that it's like taking her down this path that's gonna chimpanzees yeah do you think there's like a good support group for that yeah jim's anonymous uh for me one of the saddest things though mike and this is kind of to go to your point that i feel like we feel worse for tonka was when you see tanya showing him

her phone and just going through all those videos of chimpanzees his sons yeah that was sad He looks really depressed to me. And then also you see his cage is pretty small and he's completely confined to it. So I totally agree. I think Tonka's the true victim in this whole thing. Tonka and Buck. Tonka and Buck. That brings up the next segment.

We need to talk about Buck. Jeff, you brought up Buck just now. What were you going to say about him? What was your takeaway from the Buck storyline? Well, I mean, I just think you can really start questioning Tamara's motives of owning Buck when you hear that she's dressing him in her dead husband's clothes. This is not a normal thing. This is not something you should be doing to an animal.

You shouldn't be dressing them up like your dead husband. Or sleeping with your 200-pound male chimpanzee. Oh, man. Who needs to hear that said to them? You should not dress your chimpanzee in your dead husband's clothes. If you're currently putting clothes from your dead husband onto a chimpanzee, stop. Get help. Right now.

Stop it. One thing that stood out for me in both Buck and Travis's story is how often you have these people saying, like, he was the most beautiful chimpanzee. And then it shows a photo and he looks like... Tom Brady. Looks like Hoba from Planet of the Apes. It's like, no.

The Tom Brady of chimpanzees was such a fun line to me. It is great. So I actually think this is really interesting, though, that Buck initiated this attack when Tamara's daughter moved into kind of his territory. because the more that I've learned about chimps, the more that I have learned that they're an extremely territorial species and they will guard those territories pretty effectively. And it even goes to the point where chimps will use the high ground to go up and listen for other

groups of chimpanzees so that they can either infiltrate or stop infiltrators into their territory. So they're very complex thinkers when it comes to defending a territory. So the fact that Tamara's daughter moved into where Buck lived, I mean, this was his home. This whole floor of her house was essentially his territory must have been really upsetting for him. And that might have been what triggered this attack. Okay. High ground. What does that remind me of, Jeff?

Oh, Obi-won. Oh, Obi-Wan. Yep. That fight was over the second he got that high ground. So do you guys Do you guys think Tamara used the police To get rid of Buck? I don't know

We just didn't get enough of her For me to get a good read On her mind and her feelings But the audio from Did as a fact Like she did But it's just more The motive of it

Exactly the motive The audio from the call Is the telling thing Where she was extremely calm It was just a clinical You know who else was extremely calm is the cop who just like shot a chimp in the head and was like clear yeah right yeah she's like hey shoot him in the head he's like gotcha we'll do another day on the job i have in my notes how do the cops

feel about having to kill a chimp and then like right after i'm like never mind he didn't care at all yeah no i i agree with what you were saying there mike like we don't really know her motive and i don't Personally, I don't think she like orchestrated that her chimp would attack her daughter so that then she could have it pulled by the police. But I do kind of wonder if she wasn't waiting for an opportunity. As soon as he did something where she could call the police, she knew that she was going to tell them to kill her chimpanzee. And it did kind of feel that way to me. It felt like she needed an out and she got one. Well, Buck was kind of in a secure location by the time the cops got there, right?

he was like out on the porch. It seemed like they could have closed him off from people. So like... I don't know if they're ripping off police car doors. I think it can pretty easily like get through a window or a screen door or whatever. Yeah, I don't think they were secure anywhere in this house though. I think the cops definitely did the right thing shooting and killing Buck. He could have gotten wherever Tamara and her daughter were.

All right. Well, we should get back to just another absolute roller coaster ending of an episode. Throughout this episode, the filmmakers are talking about what their responsibility might be, now that they know Tonka's alive, and whether or not they should intervene. But finally, when Tanya tells Dwayne that Tanka's sick and she's going to put him down, they decide that they need to let Pita know where Tanka is, and they take evidence to Jared Goodman. And I can really see this quandary, like, they don't want to affect the story, but they also don't want to be responsible for Tanka's death.

So do you guys think they made the right call talking to Pita? Pee-wee-Herman? Yeah. Give pee-wee the call. I kind of understand why PETA is involved, but why did it have to be PETA that they called? Do you have a good read on that situation? I know they are the people behind getting the chimps removed. Kind of the lawyer in charge of like going after Tanya in court, right?

Yeah, I think they just knew that Pita would do everything they could at that point to get Tanka away from Tanya. That's a good call. I don't think it's like PETA themselves can do a search warrant or whatever, but they would definitely get the right. people involved to do all that. I feel like they did the right thing. It would have been hard not to say it immediately when they found out where Tonka is, but this chimpanzee needed a new home quick. So I definitely think they did the right thing.

Obviously for Tonka, it was the best thing possible. And then also for Tanya, it's the best thing possible. Because, like, she's caught. Like, she's on camera. This is coming out. Yeah. Worst case scenario for her at this point is they don't tell Pita. she kills the chimp and like we have this all on camera you know yeah yeah if pita learned about it

through the documentary it would have been a lot worse for sure yeah and like she had a date set up and everything like it's gonna happen yeah she was gonna go through but she loves them she loves them like a child west more than a child more than her child it really sets up episode four super well hopefully we get to see what happens the repercussions of this decision the filmmakers made, how if she finds out that Dwayne is a proxy filmmaker, if, you know, I'm really curious if any of that stuff is going to happen, if there's going to be legal repercussions.

It's just really fascinated to me now to know how this story wraps up in our final episode. What are you guys looking forward to? There's been a lot of buildup to violence, and it's not like I'm looking forward to it, but I'm anticipating some kind of bad end for Tanya, whether that's legally or physically. I hope for her sake not but well and like me being less sympathetic to her like I'm kind of excited to see her punishment because I think she deserves it all right and I want like all their other

monkeys taking away everything you want some tanya justice how about that kangaroo and a diaper do you want that taken away yeah take that way give it to me well thanks guys I'm really excited now to talk to the filmmakers talk about this decision that they had to make, and also to a primatologist, because I think this episode really dives into the psychology of these animals, their socialization, why that's so important. So that's going to be a really interesting conversation, and that's coming up next. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who

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And producer Jeremy McBride. I was. executive producer. Hey guys. So I, you know, we start out this episode. We ended on the cliffhanger in episode two that we learned Tonka was still alive. And in episode three, we do see that it is indeed Tonka. He's living in this small enclosure in her basement in Lake of the Ozarks. So the question I had for both of you off the bat is once you found this out and you knew that she had Tonka, initially was it pretty hard to decide what to do with that information? Yeah, we, you know, we struggled with that, but we realized that Taka seemed to be okay, you know, in terms of his health. So it didn't feel like Tanka was any imminent danger. And we just thought that it would be for the greater good to see where Tanya would take us, where she would lead us to it, if we could learn about more people harboring chimps. So that's what we did. We took a week by week.

For us, this whole story is all about this idea of you being unsure of where things are going to go. And things can change in an instant. You know, what you don't see is incredible contemplation that we had. What do we do? Do we continue down this route of exploring and experimenting, kind of subjectively following this person? Or do we turn them in, which was also complicated for us, the person that we've created trust around with Dwayne, and putting him in that situation. So it was very, very hard. Yeah, I can imagine. I do think another really strong point to this episode is after we've learned that Tonka is in Tanya's basement,

you guys actually go back and show what a lot of that effort was and you show her, you know, moving Tanka from Festus to Missouri or to Lake of the Ozarks. And one process of that is we meet Sai. Was he already on your radar or was this someone that Tanya brought you to that you had no idea existed. Yeah, we had no idea. It was so serendipitous the whole thing going to size. You know, we're in a rural part of Ohio going down miles of gravel roads and finally arrive at this remote property with a metal gate with lots of sightage saying, no trespassing. And the first thing you hear was this screaming of the chimpanzees, just the most incredible. cacophony. And Tanya saying, you know, my boys hear me. They know I'm coming. And she had purchased

happy meals for all the chimps. And so they were making this racket. And it was one of the more intense visceral experiences I've ever had with exotic animals. Just the noise and the banging against the caging. Anyway, we meet Cy, we meet his boyfriend who worked the the graveyard shift in a dynamite factory. And you couldn't make this stuff up. And then we began to learn about Cy's issues with the law and that he had, you know, absconded with almost $300-something thousand of the township's money. And Cy was wearing an ankle bracelet.

And he seemed so nonchalant. But of course, he's, you know, I don't know if he's still in prison, but he was on his way to prison. Yeah, it was one of the more remarkable days. Well, for me, I know in the last episode, she produced those ashes and showed them. And when I was watching, I thought, oh, you know, this is going to be some bullshit.

Like, you know, she cremated a pigeon or something and put its ashes in here. And it seemed almost like it was a really poorly thought-out plan. But then you actually see what's gone into this. And you realize, yeah, she was driving around a decapitated corpse of a chimpanzee. and had it cremated and all of that. They went to some great lengths to hide this. And I really liked the sigh part because he is so honest.

And he immediately says, you know, if you want to know who I am, just Google me. And he does have this incredible backstory. But another question I had about all that was he seems really willing to help Tanya. As soon as she shows up, it seems like she wasn't that connected to him. She got his information from Connie. and he's willing to go to pretty great lengths to help her. And I'm curious, as you've learned more about this community and these people, do you find that there is this strong camaraderie between people that own primates?

Or is that just kind of a fluke that he was so willing to do this? I think that she got lucky because it could have ended completely differently. She did not know, Sy, from Adam. And she entrusted this guy she'd never met before with this chip, her beloved Tonka, Sai could have just as easily not returned the chip or had taken the chimp and never let her visit. No, the exotic animal world is dog eat dog, survival of the fittest.

It's not, generally speaking, the most trustworthy group of people. And I'm grossly generalizing, but no, it could have ended up really badly for her. But wouldn't you say, Eric, also, like, that is all for sure true. at the same time, they do have this common interest to make sure that these animals don't end up on the other side, which they would kind of call, you know, not in private ownership. So, you know, despite those things around the personalities between people and those rivalries, I do think there's also this like, if it has to go with one of them over it going to a sanctuary or over it going back into the wild or whatever the case might be, they're going to choose that path, I think. Oh, yeah, that's fair. But nevertheless, it could have ended badly.

Yeah, well, I thought it was a really interesting moment, and I'm really glad you guys included it. And I also, another part of this episode that personally I felt really drawn to was we get finally this really more in-depth look into Tanya's backstory. And we get to see that, you know, she raised 75 foster children. And she adopted one of those children as her own. And she, you know, has this biological son as well. I think up until this point, you know, we, we knew a lot about Tanya and we'd seen multiple dimensions of her, but this really gave us a good look into just how caring of a person she actually is. And I think it brings this whole new feeling to the series because you do realize this is

someone who loves caring for things so much that she can't help herself. And her family even says that. Her son said, I feel like he's very insightful. There's moments where he says, you know, I, I'm almost hurt by it, but I see how much joy these animals bring her, so I couldn't take that away from her. I'll be honest with you. I used to hate the idea of being around them and stuff, but the joy that she has for taking care of these animals, man, like I'm telling you, you can just tell she's happy. And I can't get in the way of that. Yeah, I guess I'm just curious to hear your feelings on Tanya. I think this episode is very much about kind of getting inside of her head. You know, I'd say this. In any viable character or subject you explore in a documentary format, I think there's certain things that need to be satisfied.

You know, you have to have this really great on-screen presence, which we know Tanya does undoubtedly. She's herself. She is who she is. She puts herself out there. And for us, it was very interesting. Her childhood, her attraction to animals, and her journey to get to Connie's. She's a real person that has had a lot of life that she's lived in different ways. all to find her way back into this love she's had for animals, which we show, which is an honest view. Yeah, I like that. For me, as I watched it, you know, I think all three of us have a similar interest that we all love animals, you know, in different ways of devote our lives towards

animals. And there's certain things about animals that I find so fascinating, but you can see for her a lot of what she loves is what they get back to her. And, you know, she even brings that up that the first time she held a chimpanzee, she felt this incredible feeling of like maternal care almost. And that's been a thread throughout her life that she has felt this need to care for things. And it really humanizes her, and I think in a really beautiful way in this episode. I don't know what it is, Wes, but just this kind of quality of being attracted to things that other people don't find interesting or wants, maybe, that she felt a little bit about herself with fostering, with, doing hospice care. She's attracted to those situations, and I think this is very much similar in a way. So there's real compassion to that idea of someone who is willing to put their time into

something like that. Yeah, there's another really great moment that illustrates it really well where you are talking to Alan Cumming, Eric, and he kind of says, you know, I understand how Tanya went down this path, and I empathize for her, and I can see the attraction that those animals have. And you could see that he even kind of had that same reaction to them and that in a different world, he could have gone down the exact same path. But he had that stopping point, you know, and I think most of us do have that. And with Tanya, she really ran with those feelings. And speaking of backstories, and you brought this up a second ago, Jeremy, we get to learn a lot about Buck, the chimpanzee. And it's kind of another cautionary tale that's placed in this episode.

And I'm curious to ask you both, why did you decide to include this story of Buck, the chimpanzee who lived in Pendleton, Oregon. I think I mentioned this to you, Wes. Eric and I, I remember this moment, Eric. We were by our favorite little spot near the kind of bar at your property, the little dining area outside. And I share with you the news that Buck was killed.

He was shot. And Eric and I talked weeks before planning this trip to go out to Pendleton to cover this story. And this happened, Wes, right at the same time when we had sent Dwayne down to Festus to explore what was going down with these Missouri Primate Foundation chimps that were being confiscated. And we missed it.

And from that point on, we made this very conscious effort to document everything. So I think that context was really important for the Buck story. And we did some reconnaissance. Eric went down there. We found Jamie. And I'll say this. Jamie and Alan and Angela Scott, who we see in the first episode, they all have similar stories in a way to that of Tanya. obviously Tanya, as you say, took a little further, but they all have this kind of real attraction

and connection with a particular animal. In this case, we're learning about Buck in his story, a story that probably would never have been told otherwise. And it was a remarkable one. I think thematically, we were looking for a way to bring that story in to illustrate what Tanya would be going through in that particular moment, which for us was about kind of pressure. Travis, in a way, in episode two, was used to describe and illustrate, you know, danger what could happen if you have a captive chimpanzee that you're in a situation you're not supposed to. Similarly, Buck was about, as time goes on, this ticking time bomb kind of event could occur. The life they led, it was really profound, but ultimately she ended up being in a cage, you know, with this chip. She could never leave. And so, you know, it's this cautionary, that one might think, oh, it's redundant with the Travis story, but it had its own sort of interesting elements that we felt was important to shape and round out this entire story about

keeping chimpanzees. And she, of course, she of course didn't want Buck to be rescued because her image in this town, Pendleton, was everything. And so she needed to find a way out. So it was just a very sad, tragic ending of a senseless ending of Buck's life. I think for me, the thing that I really resonated with with that storyline, and you bring up Travis too, that with Travis, it's like the worst case scenario. And with Buck, it seems like something that Tanya could easily find herself going down the exact same path, where, you know, Tonka gets older. She, her people that are her support systems start kind of falling to the wayside. And she's stuck alone with this chimpanzee that she can no longer take care of.

And it seems like she's already kind of getting there. So in the episode, we do learn that. We get this call to Dwayne where Tanya tells him that Tonka's very sick, that he has congestive heart failure. And now you are dealing with a subject who is potentially going to harm this animal that you do now have some responsibility for. So I'm curious now at the end of the episode, how your decision making has changed and why you finally decide to go to Jared Goodman at PETA and turn over this evidence.

Yeah, yeah. I was in Philadelphia and we get this call from Tanya. And Tanya tells Dwayne that she has been advised by her veterinarian, that it's not fair to keep Taka in this state with this congestive heart failure. And in that call, she stated something like June's, second is the date and she even said to Dwayne do you want to come and film be putting talking talking down i think i called jeremy immediately and i said you can't believe what just happened what do we do and we had maybe a week or two to figure it out dwayne was having a birthday was

literally a clown performing a birthday party service right that was happening so so so it's like it was never so much of this you just can't can't make it up but this was one that For us at that moment in time, we knew we had to take action. Yeah, I mean, I should say that through this process, Dwayne became very close with Tanya. And he really sincerely, along with us, wanted to figure out a way out for Tanya. Yeah, I mean, you do see their friendship in the film. Like, he answers the phone. I checked or I clocked to this.

Like he says, hey, T, you can tell they were butts at this point. And that has to be really hard to form this friendship. and especially with Dwayne's background where he has kind of been on the other side of these things and he kind of knows what's coming. I'm sure that was really tricky for him. I was sympathizing with him in that moment for sure. Well, before we meet up with our other guest, I did want to point out one of my favorite moments in this episode,

just a little bit of levity. There's the scene where we do see what Tanya's doing to hide Tanka. and she literally with her husband is pushing his entire crate up the stairs at a holiday inn. We went ahead and just went to the holiday inn 2.4 miles from the facility, but we couldn't leave him in the trailer. We put him at a bathroom at KCP because we're not going to trash a hotel. I waited until I heard that Pito hit the facility. And then we just drove straight to size.

Which to me was insane, A, that they were able to. to do that and be that they managed to just get a room at the holiday in to store this chimpanzee in. The full version of her story, which is much more expressive, you wouldn't believe it. You just wouldn't, the casualness in which she describes how normal it would be just to like, you know, dart a chimp, put him in the back of your truck, carry him up the stair, put him in a transport cage, bring him upstairs, put him in the bathtub, go for it, eight hour drive, 10 hour drive, no problem. It was surreal. It really is.

All right, so now for the second part of this interview, we are joined here by Dr. Craig Stanford. Craig is the professor of biological sciences and anthropology at USC Dornseif and a very accomplished primatologist. Thank you for joining us today, Craig. Hello, Wes. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, we're very excited to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this for a couple weeks talking to you about this. Cool. Okay, Craig, so my first question I had for you, and we've talked about this a bit throughout the series,

but just how important are social groups for chimpanzees? Oh, chimpanzees are as socially needy as humans are. You know, if you think about what's the worst thing you can do to a human being short of execution? The answer is solitary confinement, right? We are so utterly social that we cannot survive, really psychologically survive without it, and chimpanzees are exactly the same way, the same level of neediness for being social. I think that's really interesting because a few times in this series we hear some of these people who have captive chimpanzees say that the only thing a chimpanzee needs is its mother. And I've looked into your work. I've read some of your papers and that doesn't seem to be true from what I've learned.

Yeah, you know, I've been involved in some of these cases. Cases of chimps that are kind of surrogate children in people's households, one very well-known case in a suburb of L.A. where I am. And that's what the owners, they like to call themselves parents, but let's call them what they are owners. That's what the owners always say. They feel the animals have lived in a human environment from infancy. They cannot survive as a chimp in the world. And that's virtually never true, because what chimps really need more than anything else is the company of other chimpanzees. I always say it's a little bit like raising.

It's like if you or I were raised as children in an extraterrestrial civilization, where we were treated very humanely. and lovingly even. But, you know, you would be, you would grow up to be a little bit of a messed up person because you would not have any of your cultural connections that need to be there. So that's really who chimps are. And it's really not in a human household. Something you just mentioned, I was reading a paper of years where you talk about how, you know, it goes beyond just socialization. They actually, there's culture in these animals. There's stuff, there's cultural transmission. I'm curious, you know, is there any, possible way for a human to provide adequate socialization for a chimpanzee, or is there always going to be something missing? Well, yeah, there's always going to be something missing. I mean, you can raise a chimpanzee, and this has been done not only in households like the ones featured

in the show, but in research projects. You know, Washoe, the famous sign language using chimp back in the 60s, was raised in the home of the graduate students as a human child and, you know, became in some ways quite well-adjusted and happy chimp. But even those researchers would be the first to say that having social contact with other chimps is just fundamental. And yeah, you know, you asked about culture. So yes, chimpanzees have culture. They have cultural traditions. This was hotly debated for decades. But we now know that there are, there's a systematic pattern all across Africa, of chimpanzee communities and populations that will use, they'll do a particular style of grooming one another, they'll use a particular kind of tool for a particular task, and that varies

from forest to forest to forest, and it's not even dependent on what's available in the environment, like the kinds of stones to be used as tools or whatever. These are cultural traditions. They're just like ours. They're very simple versions of the fact that when you go across the world, you know, from one village to the next, people make their house. houses a different way. They celebrate their weddings in a different way. It's very much a simple version of that. Interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I'm a bear specialist. I know a fair amount about bears. I've researched a lot of different species, but just this tiny bit of surface level looking into chimpanzees that I've had to do over the last few weeks, I've

learned that they are such an incredibly complex animal. And it seems like they're an extremely reactive animal too. Is that a bad characterization for them? Well, I mean, you have to remember that fundamentally they're wild animals, right? So even if you raise them as children, if you put clothing on them, if you raise them at the dinner table, you know, you're raising a wild animal as if it were your child, but genetically it's still that wild animal, no matter how much we want to kind of caricature it. I fact, it's interesting that you say you work with bears because I got a lot of phone calls. If you remember the whole Tim Treadwell. Oh, yeah. A grizzly bear incident.

The famous movie was made by Bernard Herzog. And I got a lot of calls from people asking me, what's wrong with being a participant observer in grizzly society? Jane Goodall did that. And I said, well, the difference is that chimps typically do not come into your tent and eat you when you're an adult. Yeah. And honestly, in some ways, as a person who specializes in bears, I'd be much more comfortable living around grizzly bears than I would be around chimpanzees.

Oh, is that right? Well, you'd also, you know bears, so you know how to. I've been attacked by a chimp once, and in the end, the attack was fast and all that, but it was scary. And in the end, I did basically what you would do for a close-up bear attack. I just huddled on the ground, covered my face and my neck and so forth. But the level of danger is, although chimp's certainly a powerful, dangerous animals, grizzlies, obviously, are on a whole other order. All right. Well, I'm glad to know that I guess I've always wondered about that myself.

like I've told people even if I had to be in a cage with either of those animals, I'd probably pick a grizzly bear. But for me, it's because I think I understand them. I think it's exactly what you just said. I wouldn't want to be in a cage with either of them, actually. But there is also that idea that people have that they can outrun an animal over a short haul. And that's, of course, with either of those animals, that's just an insane idea.

Yeah. That actually, so that's a question I'm sure you've been asked before that is, maybe an annoying question, but we've talked about this a fair amount on tooth and claw about the actual strength of these animals. And I know, you know, in old experiments, they thought that chimpanzees were up to five times the strength of a human being. And then that's been adjusted to something more like one and a half times. And I'm just curious from your perspective, how, you know, how strong actually are they? Is there any human out there that could, you know, survive a physical fight with the chimpanzee? No, no. I think the answer to that is kind of arbitrary,

but what you just said, the answer is absolutely no. A really big male chimp in the wild, not in captivity, where they become grossly big and overweight, but in the wild is maybe 150, 160 pounds, something like that, but enormously strong compared to a man or a woman of the same size. And it's partly body strength, and it's partly leverage, arm leverage strength. You know, the lever arm of a chimp, their arms are just much longer than ours relative to their body. So they have that enormous level of strength beyond whatever their body size and strength is. So, no, I mean, being attacked by a chimp would be a horrible fate. And in those circumstances, like, for example, in the film, we see the story of Charlotte Nash and Travis and Sandy Harold.

You know, Charlotte, as I'm sure you're aware, was attacked viciously and horrifically. When you see something like that happen, are we looking at aggression or are we looking at communication? How did these animals use violence in their societies? Oh, that's aggression, of course. That can't be interpreted anything but aggression. When it happens in the wild, like I said, I've been, almost everybody who's worked with wild chimps has been, I'll put it in quotes, attacked, because we never know exactly what inspires it or what is what's going on in the chimps' head. They normally don't bite. In an attack on a researcher, the chimps are utterly habituated to people. They don't flee from us. They don't usually

approach us. But when they do, the occasional chimp, it's sort of like an act of bullying, but it might actually be in some way enjoyable for the chimp in kind of a playful way. It's not enjoyable for us at all. So there, you could say, is it aggression exactly? But in these cases, the tragic ones like the one you just mentioned in Connecticut, no, it was, whatever triggered the chimp is impossible to say. I can't, I'd just be guessing. But yeah, it was obviously. It was obviously an attempt to do terrible harm. What is it that, what's so difficult about caring for a chimp in captivity? What are specific things about this animal that make them difficult to keep? Well, first, there's this, the sheer fact of, as we said, the strength of the animal, that, you know,

if it's a male chimp in particular, but really both males and females, once they reach adolescence or pre-adolescence, that animal is going to begin to, if it's a male in particular, the hormones are flowing, and that animal was going to begin to trash its environment. This is what happened in the famous case I was involved in in a suburb of L.A. here, West Covina, where there was a baby chip named Moe, who had been, quote, adopted by a couple from an animal, from a hunter in Africa. Almost certainly, he bought the chimp from an animal dealer, and long before 9-11 and enhanced airport security, he was able to bring it back into the U.S. But Mo became an adolescent, and he began to trash their house, not aggressive to people at that point, but, you know, to property. So they built a big cage in the

backyard. I was an expert witness. The case settled did not go to trial, but I was asked, how would you feel as somebody who spent years living with chimps in the wild and loving them as another species so similar to how would you feel about having an animal in the backyard next to where your kids are playing? And I said, of course, it would be a nightmare. In all levels, it would be a nightmare. The risk of harm to my family would be the biggest nightmare, of course. And ultimately, you know, these situations never turn out well. It's always a lose-lose situation because in the end, Mo broke out of his cage once and damaged a police car. And then in another occasion, he bit a finger off of a woman who was visiting.

So something like this always happened. And then Mo was taken away. And the story, Mo ended up probably being intentionally released from a sanctuary outside of L.A. where the settlement involved him being sent to live. So the point is that, you know, and then the couple who consider themselves surrogate parents, it was an emotional tragedy for them, and it was a literal tragedy for Mo. It's virtually always a lose-lose situation. Yeah, and I'm familiar with Mo's story, and I know that St. James Davis was also mauled by chimpanzees

while he was visiting Mo. Right, yes. And the details are really murky, and it was a long time ago. But yes, the two male chimps that were housed next to Mo, apparently their cage was left unlocked. mysteriously and they broke out when the La Devisas was visiting on Moe's birthday. And those two male chimps attacked the La Devis's and he protected his wife and ended up just horrendously injured by it. Eric and Jeremy, I'm curious if you guys had anything you wanted to bring up with Craig while he's here. We got a microphone in front of him. Yeah, yeah. One question actually listening to you, Craig,

is when a chimp attacks in the wild, another chimp, do they ever attack? with the intention of not only attacking, but eating the other chimp. Because in the case of, you know, Charlotte Nash, you know, the chip was actually eating her face off, not just attacking her. When you say eating, he might have been chewing, but my guess is not knowing every detail, is that that was one way for him to inflict maximum damage, meaning he's not hungry, right? He's a captive chip. He's probably dramatically overfed.

But the question you raise is really interesting, because in the wild, when we see these attacks happen, we see killings happen. Males usually kill anybody they can get their hands on, but they typically don't eat them. In a few cases, when they catch a baby chimp, they take one away from a mom and the opposing neighboring community. They might eat that baby, but it's very rarely where, and obviously the body of a chimp is a massive gift of protein and fat, right? And chimps love meat, which Jane Goodall discovered in the early 60s, that they weren't vegan at all. But they never really seem to see this carcass that they've just created as a meal. So I think we can safely say that these attacks are not, they're not provoked by hunger. I ask because obviously

chimps eat monkeys. Yeah, and that was one of Jen Gullos' early discoveries. And my own work, when I worked with Goodall and afterward was on exactly that, on chimps eating meat. Why do they eat meat? What's the pattern of eating meat? It's usually columnus monkeys that they are going after. and I was trying to answer a lot of the questions related to that, absolutely. But when they're killing each other, there are cases of cannibalism for sure, but it's usually not. So we also talk a lot about, obviously, our main characters in this series and their connection to these particular animals, these chimpanzees. And obviously, a lot of it's linked to this idea of anthropomorphism, which in some ways can be good,

in some ways it can highlight their own selves in these animal relationships. which can create empathy. And we later learn about this idea that was shared by someone that, you know, the mistake of love is the very idea with some of these captive chimps that have been in Hollywood. Most of what the affection that they share back to their owners, is that something where it was trained? They were trained to love these people through their upbringing. What is a chimp feeling in that relationship? I think you could ask the same question about your dog or cat or if you raised a bear cub, the animal has a need for a bond, right? We probably shouldn't call it love because that really is just total anthropomorphizing,

but the bond is incredibly important. The bond consists of all kinds of affectionate acts and touching, rubbing, vocal, that kind of correlates sort of with what we would call love, right? And to be honest, I'm very much against anthropomorphizing, but if you're going to anthropomorphize, chimps would make much more sense than a dog or a cat because, as we know, people treat their dogs and cats like humans, and they spend vast amounts of money on them, as you would on your child. So a chimpanzee is very, very, very similar to a human, so it kind of makes more sense. But no, when you raise a chimp in a human household, the chimp is utterly reliant on you in every possible way, physically, psychologically, emotionally.

So the difference might be that when the chimp becomes an adolescent, although it still will recognize that bond, you know, it's a wild animal. You're raising a wild animal. And so it will, in many cases and times, revert to being a wild animal. And the hormones are flowing. And so it doesn't have control over what it does in all circumstances. Well, something to add to that, too, and Craig can correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. But we've brought up dogs and cats a few times now. And these are animals that we've domesticated over thousands of years. So they're essentially part of our social group now. Whereas a chimpanzee in captivity is trained. It's not a domesticated animal. It's a trained animal. And so that kind of natural behavior is much closer to the surface than you would see in a dog or a cat or an animal like that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we bring these animals into captivity and we domesticate them over thousands of years, and they become a fundamentally different creature than they were. So that isn't true for a chimp. The chimp has a layer of captivity on it with an ape because they're kind of seen as caricatures of humans in appearance. Sometimes we lose sight of that and that's a shame. But so Tonka in this case, to Jeremy's point, was trained to, you know, sick out its tongue when it wanted something in this very cute way, was trained to kiss through the bars, was trained to, you know, put on glasses, was trained to do all these things to signal to whoever was taking care of Tonka, you know, that Tonka wanted food. But it was all these qualities that

Tonka was trained to do that would make someone naive think that this chimp really loves you. Absolutely. And that's where this confusion lied with Tanya, who's our main character of the story. Yeah. And Tanka. And what would you say to Tanya about that love, all these things that Tonka does that makes her feel such a bond? Well, I'm sure from her perspective, she would probably argue that you're training a child to do all the things that a small child does when it's a toddler and it's not really a fully cognitively developed human being, right? But as you say, I mean, the reason primates are so fascinating in captivity is they're utterly trainable. They're so big brain that they're very trainable to do a wide variety of skills. You can call them tricks

and to do things that appeal to people. But again, you're still talking about a wild animal. You're talking about, as Wes said, a trained wild animal, not a domestic animal. And there's a really fundamental difference that I think the owners, like Tanya, lose sight of. And, you know, it's understandable because they're so close to this animal. And they come to believe the animal, quote, needs them, which in a sense it does, but in another sense, it eventually won't. Yeah. You do see that throughout the film, and you see that it feels like they almost feel like they know more about these animals than anyone else.

Well, just like your children. It's just like if somebody, it's just like if you went to a therapist, I'm giving you advice and you say, wait, wait, wait, this is my kid. I know my kid. And the therapist is speaking from a much broader background, not just this one child experience, right? So yes, parents are like that. They fall back on that. Yeah. So Craig, I, just to wrap this up, I, on our show, tooth and claw, we often end with some sort of conservation message. And we, you know, We've been talking about chimps in captivity. I think there are conservation threads to that whole discussion. But I'm curious just to hear from you, how is this animal doing in the wild?

What's their conservation status right now? And just a little bit more about how they're doing in general. Right. Yeah, that's a good point to wrap up on. So there are four great apes, right? They're chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos in Africa, and they're orangutans in Southeast Asia. And all of them are endangered species. all of them are highly threatened with extinction.

Of the four, the chimpanzee is actually the most abundant remaining, but the wild population, which is very difficult to survey, I said they don't really even live in cohesive groups, so censusing them is really difficult, is certainly under 200,000, and exactly where it is, we're not sure, but something like that would be, that would be a pretty liberal estimate, actually.

So that sounds, oh, gee, that's almost a quarter of a million animals left, but, you know, they're 8 billion people. And Africa is the most forested continent remaining, but that's rapidly changing, of course. And in the coming century, it's going to change even more rapidly. So, yeah, they're in terrible trouble. And one problem chimps have especially is that unlike these other, unlike guerrillas, for example, which sometimes live close to villages, actually,

if they're not being hunted, chimpanzees, whether they're hunted or not, they need huge expanses of good quality forest. they eat mainly ripe fruit in the wild, and so they need ripe fruit trees. And any forest that's been logged or people are hunting other animals, chimps are never going to last very long there. So, yeah, they're in terrible trouble. They've been in endangered species for a long time now,

and we worry a lot about them. And we still find populations of them occasionally that we didn't know existed in some of the more forested remote parts of central Africa. But by and large, their future is going to be determined in the coming 50 to 75 years and it doesn't look great right now. All right. Well, we really appreciate you helping us learn a little bit more about this animal. For me, it's been a really incredible few weeks getting to dig into some of their natural

history, learning from professionals like you. They are such an amazing animal and one that's hard not to see ourselves in. So it has been, for me, really an interesting and amazing journey. and I wanted to say thank you for helping us learn some more. Oh, well, thanks. I'm nice talking to you. Yeah. Great job, Craig.

Thank you. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Craig. Take care, guys. That's it for this episode. A big thank you again to our guest, Eric Good, Jeremy McBride, and Craig Stanford. The third episode of the HBO documentary Chimp Crazy is available to stream now on Max. Tooth and Claw is 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 Wyn, Michael Gluckstatt, and Aaron Kelly at HBO.