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[Carrie McLaren <stay.free AT verizon.net>]

Family chimp debate rages after attack
‘Large teddy bears’ still wild, animal experts warn owners
By Amy Argetsinger
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/living/11768688.htm
Washington Post

L . Davis
Washington Post photos

St. James Davis holds a one-man protest in his West Covina, Calif., 
yard in 2000 as part of the Davises’ efforts to bring Moe home from a 
wildlife refuge.

Moe served as flower-thrower and best man at the wedding of St. James 
and LaDonna Davis. Moe peed on a woman that day.

LOS ANGELES – In 1967, LaDonna Davis’ boyfriend went on a trip to 
Tanzania and came back with quite a surprise: a chimpanzee. It was a 
baby still, an orphan her boyfriend said he had rescued from the 
poachers who killed its mother, and it was just adorable – “a large 
teddy bear,” LaDonna’s mother declared. They named him Moe.

The boyfriend, a stock-car racer named St. James, would carry the 
little fellow in a sling around his chest as he worked at his auto body 
shop in West Covina, Calif. When she married St. James a couple of 
years later, Moe was “a combination of flower-thrower and best man,” 
LaDonna Davis recalls.

This wasn’t just any chimp, Davis and her mother, Terry DeVere explain 
patiently. This was Moe.

“He would reach his hands out and put them around your neck,” says 
Davis, a sun-creased blonde of 64. “You couldn’t turn it off,” all that 
charm, all that love.

As Davis tells her story in the sleek conference room of an attorney’s 
office, she gingerly moves her left hand, swaddled in the gauze and 
tape that protect what remains of her thumb, a reminder that this train 
of sweet memories and funny stories is not going to end well.

Davis is here to talk about a terrible thing that happened, an event so 
traumatic she would be forgiven for not talking at all. But she must.

Moe slept in their bed until he got too big. He learned to use the 
toilet. He loved to watch cowboys and Indians on television. A pretty 
normal childhood, as Davis describes it.

Jane Goodall’s research revealed chimps’ intelligence, sensitivity and 
uncanny similarities to humans. Her later studies would chart more 
brutal behavior.

Some people in West Covina looked askance at this unconventional 
domestic situation. City officials tried to evict Moe a few years after 
his arrival, but the judge ruled for the Davises. Moe, he proclaimed, 
“is somewhat better behaved than some people.”

Moe had lived peaceably with the Davises for more than 30 years when, 
in 1998, he escaped from his 10-by-12-foot outdoor enclosure and 
rampaged through the neighborhood.

The Davises said Moe had been frightened by an electrical shock when a 
worker tried to repair his cage. But it took several police officers 
and animal control workers to restrain him, and an officer’s hand was 
mauled, city officials said.

The next year, a visitor put her hand inside Moe’s cage, though the 
Davises said they warned her. They say she had long red fingernails 
that looked like Moe’s favorite licorice. He bit, and the Davises later 
settled a lawsuit with the woman. The next day, West Covina officials 
removed Moe to a wildlife refuge.

The Davises were devastated. And they fought back, in petitions, 
fundraisers and heart-rending media interviews. Reporters found St. 
James Davis weeping outside a court hearing: “I want our family back 
together!”

Chimpanzees have always inspired reactions more complex than that of 
other exotic animals, primatologists say.

The Humane Society of the United States, which strongly opposes wild 
animals in private homes, estimates that up to 15,000 chimps nationwide 
might be living as pets.

Except, Virginia Landau, director of ChimpanZoo, a research program at 
the Jane Goodall Institute in Tucson, Ariz., noted, many chimp owners 
“don’t really think of it as a pet – they think of it as a replacement 
for a child.”

And Moe was no longer a child. He was in vigorous middle age, a roughly 
4-foot, 130-pounder with the upper-body strength of three linebackers. 
West Covina officials maintained that he could no longer live within 
city limits.

A years-long legal battle ensued. Eventually all criminal charges were 
dropped and the Davises won a $100,000 judgment in their due-process 
suit against the city. But Moe still couldn’t come home.

The Davises visited Moe regularly until 2003, when the sanctuary had 
licensing problems. After months of negotiation, Moe was transferred to 
Animal Haven Ranch, near Bakersfield. Last October they went to see him 
– the first time in five years they had spent substantial time with 
him.

“He was caged up and frustrated and a little bit territorial,” says 
Craig Stanford, a professor of anthropology and biology at the 
University of Southern California. He needed the companionship of other 
chimps. At Animal Haven Ranch, he had them.

The 22-acre non-profit sanctuary was founded by Virginia and Ralph 
Brauer for exotic pets that had worn out their welcome, castoffs from 
circuses and zoos. The Brauers had six primates plus Moe, who as a 
newcomer to the animal world was kept in his own cage.

In a cage nearby were four other chimps, including males Buddy, 16, and 
Ollie, 13, who had worked for a Hollywood animal trainer until they 
grew too strong and aggressive.

The Davises made the three-hour drive to see Moe every 10 days or so, 
bringing enough food for the entire menagerie. Yet LaDonna Davis says 
she never visited the other chimps.

The day of the attack, March 3, started as a happy one – the day they 
celebrated as Moe’s 39th birthday. The couple arrived with special 
treats: new toys and a beautiful sheet cake with raspberry filling. As 
her husband headed toward the cage with Moe’s favorite chocolate drink, 
Davis remembers seeing their chimp clap his hands with joy.

She put the cake on the table next to Moe’s cage and got the rest of 
the presents. She cut two pieces of cake. When St. James handed one to 
Moe through an opening in the cage, the chimp dug in immediately, 
smearing icing all over his lips.

As LaDonna moved to cut her own piece, she glimpsed something to her 
left. It was one of the teenage male chimps. He was out of his cage.

“I made eye contact with him,” she says. “That instantly changed his 
demeanor.”

He slammed into her backside, knocking her into St. James. Just like 
that, the chimp “just chomped off my thumb.”

Her husband pushed her under the table, and the chimps – because now a 
second had appeared – turned their frenzy on him.

LaDonna watched as one latched onto St. James’ head, the other onto his 
foot. She chokes on the words: “They virtually were – I don’t know how 
you say it – eating him alive.”

Davis says she screamed, and the Brauers’ son-in-law, Mark Carruthers, 
came running. Carruthers retrieved a handgun, according to Davis and 
police accounts. As Buddy lifted his head, Carruthers fired a single 
bullet into the animal’s brain.

As Buddy fell away, Ollie began dragging St. James’ mutilated body 
away. The 62-year-old man was conscious but near death. He had lost his 
nose, an eye, most of his fingers, both testicles and much of the flesh 
from his buttocks and face and left foot.

Carruthers followed, and fired again. And then it was over.

Why did they do it?

It’s the question that hangs over almost every conversation about the 
case. Chimp attacks on humans are highly unusual.

How could this have happened to people who knew and loved these 
creatures so well?

USC’s Stanford gets frustrated at that. “If a tiger attacked these 
people, you wouldn’t say, ‘Why was this tiger angry?’ ” he says.

Stanford’s point is: They were wild animals.

Intelligent enough to learn to jimmy the lock on their cage and push 
through two other doors that Virginia Brauer accidentally left 
unsecured, according to an investigation by the Kern County sheriff. 
But immune to our attempts to psychoanalyze or blame.

Were they jealous? Stanford argues it was probably much simpler than 
that: The chimps were out of their cage, their comfort zone. Moe was 
the new, threatening male who needed to be taken down a peg, but they 
couldn’t get at him. So “they attacked the first individuals they came 
across who were in their immediate territory.”

For weeks, Davis went without seeing Moe. Almost every day has been 
spent with her husband, who remains in a medically induced coma, 
fighting for his life.

“I don’t think he’ll ever be the same,” Davis says.

St. James has had more than a dozen surgeries so far; the Davises, who 
are uninsured, could end up with medical bills totaling more than a 
million dollars, according to their lawyer, Gloria Allred. The couple 
won’t sue Animal Haven because the ranch had no liability insurance. 
Allred and Davis persuaded a state senator to sponsor a bill requiring 
sanctuaries to carry insurance.

On a recent Sunday, Davis went to see Moe. It was May 8. Mother’s Day.

“I had some fear” going back to the scene, she says. But there was her 
boy, jumping up and down as she waved to him, and then she did not feel 
so afraid.



© 2005 Journal Gazette and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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