At the beginning of the year we watched part of the movie “Grizzly Man”. It was a pretty memorable film about a man in Alaska who thought he had a major connection with bears and nature. It turned out that after being with them for years, there was one moment in time that the bears did not give him their usual response. He ended up getting mauled to death by one of the bears that he had a connection with. As I was watching parts of the news with my mom last night, a terrifying story came up. A woman in Connecticut had a pet chimpanzee that was considered part of the family. This chimp, named Travis had been a star on T.V. and Travis had been considered to be very tame and would do nothing to harm anyone. This was obviously proven wrong when the owner had a friend over and the chimp went crazy. He had been on anxiety medicine that may have caused him to be a little off. He mauled the woman (friend of the owner) for 12 minutes; he bit off both of her hands and tore up her face. The owner did try to stop him by stabbing him and bribing him and called the police, but when the police came he tried to attack them and so all they could do was hide in their cars and shoot him. He did not die instantly but he ran back inside to his play room and died there. The woman was sent to the hospital and had 7 teams of trauma surgeons trying to stabilize her since she was in such critical conditions.
The parallel between these two situations is pretty clear. They both show that even though you can tame a wild animal to a certain extent, they still have their wild life instincts. Nobody has any business acting as if a wild animal is a member of their family. If you are dealing with wild animals you need to be trained for the job you do, not as a leisure activity.
Would you ever consider working with wild animals or taming one to be your pet? What would you do if you were ever in a situation like these?
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2 comments:
Great post Kelly!! If you think about how long 12 minutes is, it is really scary that someone was mauled for that long by a chimp that was 5 times a strong as any human! Great parallel between Grizzley Man and this news story!
It's scary to think that the poor woman had to go through quite possibly the worst 12 minutes anyone will ever have to go through. I love animals, I always have and nothing is going to change that, but with that love also comes a respect that the owner clearly did not have. A wild animal is still wild no matter what you do to it. There is no difference if you raise it in your home or if it is raised in the wild. It genes tell it how to act in situations, these animals do not take previous times into account when they are scared or angry, they just do what the are hardwired to do. It's sad that the chimp had to die because if he had been taken care of this would not have happened, but what's done is done and I hope that people who own wild animals learn from this.
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