Quit trying to take the wild out of wild animal

Just when you wonder what you’re going to blog about for tomorrow, the crazy people come out to play. Unfortunately, this womans’ play turned horribly, horribly tragic. What’s the worse part ( if there could be one )? It could have all been prevented, with simple common sense and some basic government regulation banning average private citizens from keeping wild animals.

Below is the chilling and desperate call to 911:

“The brutality of the attack was beyond horrifying. Travis, the chimpanzee that had starred in Old Navy TV ads and lived with Sandra Herold more as a son than a pet, was savagely mauling the face of Herold’s friend, Charla Nash, inflicting grave injuries. In her desperation, Herold had no choice but to stab Travis with a chef’s knife.

And as she plunged the knife repeatedly into the 200-pound animal, “He looked at me like, ‘Mom, what did you do?’ ” Herold told NBC’s Jeff Rossen in an interview that aired exclusively on TODAY Wednesday.
From NBC Today Show transcript

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Now, for you anti-government types that want to jump in to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, sit down and shut up for a minute.

I grew up in South Florida, and had close family friends that owned chimps. We also knew people that had just about every other wild and exotic animal short of a rhinoceros. You don’t have to spend much time around this sort of situation to realize that it’s nothing short of C-R-A-Z-Y.

To have full disclosure here: I also owned a capucine monkey for a short time. My family was in the ‘pet and garden’ business, and animals - including wild and exotic, tropical fish and such were just part of the daily scene. It was Florida of the 1950s-60s, where everybody seems to engage in this.

Everybody ought to spend time in a house with an ape on the loose. Looking back on it now, I really can’t imagine how we put up with it. You can train animals like this until you’re blue in the goddamn face, and you’re still going to have utter chaos and destruction on a daily basis. To not be honest about this is to invite disaster - maybe not now, but certainly later. It will happen. Not one of the people I knew could, in the end, deal with these animals as they aged and had to either give them to a zoo or have them destroyed.

By the time, I was an young adult however, even I wasn’t completely convinced. I thought I could handle owning a wolf hybrid. This was nothing short of S-T-U-P-I-D. I had this beautiful animal for several years before one day, he inexplicably turned on me, after having eaten most of a doorway in my laundry room. As I had him destroyed, I knew that I’d made a horrible mistake. The fault - and delusion - was entirely mine.

Now listen to these folks who were victims of an very similar attack. It just proves my point that, since some people are going to be perpetual slow learners, government regulation needs to step in:

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Here’s the take away, if you haven’t already figured it out: There will always be people that let their emotional selves trump the rational self - and they make some incredibly stupid fucking choices.

This is why laws need to be in place to prevent it. This isn’t about private behavior being regulated - so the Libertarians can sit down and shut up, too. Private behavior - like smoking some weed, isn’t at issue here. Private actions aren’t at issue - until they rip somebody’s face off, as in the case above. Then it becomes a very public issue.

It’s just a guess, but there probably won’t be enough insurance money available to the woman victim in Stamford, CT to cover the medical expenses and reconstructive surgeries should she survive. The nitwit who had the ape, probably doesn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. So the taxpayers will be on the hook for the victims medical costs.

That means you and I.

This horrible experience is also about not being honest about animals, and expecting ‘human’ behavior from them. This is unfair to the dignity of the animal as an animal, and perhaps a comment on how empty we allow our own lives to become - sans healthy human relationships.

I have a very elderly Jack Russell Terrier, which we all deeply love. However, the fact remains that I foolishly put my face down next to her quickly the other day to give her a smooch - she’s almost completely deaf and has cataracts - which startled her and she snapped dangerously close to my face. That was me being stupid. Asta was just being Asta. I quickly informed the family that they shouldn’t put their faces down close to her like that, in a foolish attempt to ‘mother’ her, since one of us will get bitten and that would be tragic in more ways than one.

In other words, I need to allow my dog to be herself - a dog, while I need to be a rational human being. Don’t get me started on people who own pitbulls and similar dogs.

With this guidelines in place we can all be happy and healthy. For others, however, let’s put some federal regulations in place to prevent innocent bystanders from becoming the victims of stupid pet owners - from private behavior taking a toll on the innocent public. It has to be federal, since we also have states that tend toward being slow learners - Nevada, Alabama and Florida for example. So it’s time to be grown up and put a stop to it.

maven