“Monkey love is totally different to love for a child … When you adopt a monkey the bond is much, much deeper … A human child is meant to grow up and bond with other people in society. But not chimpanzees. Their mother is their whole life.”
So says chimp devotee Tonia Haddix at the start of the documentary series Chimp Crazy. We meet her (human) son later on. He seems … generously resigned.
We could spend all four hours of Chimp Crazy drilling down into these opening words, but there is much else to get through. From the makers of the huge pandemic-era hit Tiger King comes another only-in-America story involving exotic animals and their homo sapien keepers, who seem like they have been created for a tale by either a genius or a madman.
Actually, it’s more of an only-in-Missouri story. The state’s previously lax laws around the breeding, trading and owning of exotic animals means that this is where Connie Casey chose to set up shop in the 1970s. Casey became a chimp supplier to pretty much anyone else who fancied owning a cute little chimp baby without a thought for the morrow – when they were frequently returned to Casey having become too strong and unpredictable to be pets any more.
Chimp enthusiast Haddix began working at Casey’s Missouri Primate Foundation as a part-time volunteer but was soon all in on the project. She was especially devoted to one of its inhabitants – Tonka. “He loved me as much as I loved him. It was meant to be … like your love for God.” When another volunteer blew the whistle a few years ago on the conditions the remaining seven animals (down from 42 at the foundation’s peak) were being kept in, PETA launched a lawsuit against Casey. Haddix tried to thwart proceedings by taking official custody of all the chimps. PETA simply added her name to the case, and succeeded in removing the animals and rehoming them at a certified sanctuary (returning them to the wild was not a viable option at the age they were).
All except one. Tonka was missing. He died, Haddix tells them – and us. Where’s the body? She had him cremated. Can she prove it? Sure. She holds up a plastic bag of pinkish powder. That’s not what cremated chimpanzee remains look like. Does she have any other proof? She has an email from the cremator. He is her husband. It says the body was burned at 170 degrees. This is barely enough to burn a scone. PETA thinks she is hiding Tonka somewhere. A new investigation is launched and the next two episodes follow it through to its conclusion, which takes years. Haddix sets up a private petting zoo for exotic animals in the meantime, funding it by trading in them.
Chimp Crazy is not as flashy or bonkers as Tiger King. Haddix is certainly a “character”, with her Dolly Parton-ish image and her unblinking insistence on the maternal bond between a woman and her chimp babies, the sad demise of Tonka, and the fact that the Tonka she mentions in texts after his supposed death refer to a capuchin she named in his honour. But there is a bleakness to the twisted relationships on show, the unmet needs of both humans and animals that suffuses the whole in a way that the crassness of Joe Exotic and – you know – all the hitman-hiring stuff allowed Tiger King to avoid. The moral inadequacies, dearth of empathy, denialism of various people who appear, and the evident suffering of the chimps – whose desperate flinging of themselves round the cages is largely interpreted by their carers as evidence of joyfully high spirits – makes you long for a reckoning rather than just a rescue.
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It is equally hard to warm to maker Eric Goode’s approach, which is to linger on the telegenic but irrelevant aspects of Haddix’s character. She is filmed during many of her cosmetic “tweakments” and beauty appointments, served up as a joke rather than a person whose underlying motives would bear examination. More importantly, it is arguable that she has not given consent to the documentary in the first place. Goode’s post-Tiger King notoriety in the exotic animal community led him to employ someone else, with experience in the trading of such animals (which led to him developing “a relationship with the federal government” – or being handed a 14-month jail sentence as we might put it), as a “proxy director”. That’s an ethical grey area at best. Not the best place to stand if you are trying to make a point about the exploitation of helpless animals. If indeed that is Goode’s intention at all. Most of the time his film seems happy to settle for letting the audience point, laugh and gasp at the cat-and-mouse/PETA-and-chimp game unfolding. Bleak indeed.