Travis the Chimp: He was one of us, until he wasn't

[Priscilla Feral]

 

December 27, 2009

Alert Name: NYT animal alert
December 27, 2009 Compiled: 1:18 AM

MAGAZINE

Travis the Chimp: The Wild One

By MICHAEL PATERNITI (NYT)

He was one of us, until he wasn't.

December 27, 2009
THE LIVES THEY LIVED

Travis the Chimp: The Wild One
By MICHAEL PATERNITI
1995-2009
"It's nothing but a tragedy," declared the chief detective, shaking his head and rocking back in his chair. "A Roman tragedy." In 30 years he had seen a lot of cases but never one like this: the media, the public interest, the horror, the nuttiness. He clicked the mouse on his computer and played the 911 call, his eyebrows rising and falling to the terrible notes. On that cold, clear February day, in those eerie moments after the shooting, the detective and his team tracked the perpetrator, following the trail of blood to where his body finally lay, his face in a rictus like "The Death of Marat." The detective still remembered the next morning, opening his eyes in bed, muttering to himself, "That had to be a dream, right?"
It was real, of course - real in the most unscripted, messy and bizarre sense that real life can be; that American life is, with a dollop of celebrity and violence thrown in, news helicopters hovering overhead and the private world of a furry C-list actor on every TV channel, his life suddenly and gruesomely over. By all accounts, the perpetrator lived in louche splendor: filet mignon, lobster tails, Lindt chocolate, ice cream, a glass of wine in the evening. He was bathed by hand in the tub. He did as he pleased. Without a license, he drove the Corvette down the long driveway, out over nearby roads and back. He drew pictures: abstract, colorful scribblings that hung on the refrigerator and seemed to mean something to him when, in the vein of a tortured artist, he took them down for re-examination. When not drawing or playing with his stuffed animals and trapeze bar, he might surf the Web or grab the remote, sink into the couch and flip channels until finding a baseball game. (His team: whoever was on.) He enjoyed cleaning his teeth with a Waterpik.
At first, his celebrity was local. Curious, playful and cuddly, he rode along with his keepers through his hometown of Stamford, Conn., belted in the back seat. He hugged and kissed. He was a natural ham, leading to commercials for Coca-Cola and Old Navy, in which he played the role of Gilligan, starring with a klatch of B-list icons, pedaling a bamboo bike attached to a palm frond to fan Morgan Fairchild, with whom he then sipped tropical drinks. He filmed a television pilot for a talk show with Michael Moore and Sheryl Crow, appeared on the Maury Povich show. He couldn't speak except for pant-hoots and teeth-clacking, whimpering grunts and hooing, but he could, and did, allow photographs with his multitude of fans. And yet, as with many aging child actors, the work dried up. He developed a paunch. Meanwhile, he and his "mother," a human named Sandra Herold, suffered twin blows: his "sister" died in a car crash; his "father" died suddenly of cancer, leaving the two of them alone and bereft.
After the fact, there were many who questioned his familial bonds as well as the constant anthropomorphizing of Travis. After all, he was not Marat or Little Lord Fauntleroy or an artist; he was not a child or a son of human parents, an actor or even a perpetrator: he was a chimp. And as much as our chimpanzees seem forever equated with Curious George or advertising punch lines or Michael Jackson's Bubbles (an A-lister who is alive and well at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla.), or as much as we desire to find nobility and lovability in a creature that is, genetically, 98 percent us, or as much as Travis himself was raised as a human and came to replace both husband and daughter in Herold's life (he whined when she left him for short periods; she let him sleep in her bed), the clues of his origins were always self-evident. He was potty-trained but still wore oversize diapers. When guests came over, he was locked in an enclosure at the back of the house because he could be unpredictable. Once, he escaped from Herold's car and, for the next few hours in downtown Stamford, played an agitated game of cat and mouse at a busy intersection with the police.

In Jane Goodall's epic 1986 field study, "The Chimpanzees of Gombe," the animals that cluster on the Tanzanian side of Lake Tanganyika are, like us, deeply complicated and paradoxical and capable of extreme flashes of violence in their day-to-day lives. While they might adopt a deceased member's child, they might also attack and cannibalize another member of the family. While they might show great generosity, even altruism, by sharing fruiting clusters of palm nuts or sacrificing their well-being in protection of their young, their fear of the unfamiliar or encounters with strangers could lead to brutal, unprovoked attack. In episode after episode of watching the chimpanzees hunt and eat fawns, baby pigs and red colobus monkeys, Goodall observed them crushing heads, eating brains and viscera, munching eyes, lips and noses as if pork rinds. She observed them greeting each other by copulating, up to 50 times a day. They are anything but Gilligan.
On that February day, Travis sat down to a lunch of fish and chips and sipped tea from his orange-and-yellow-striped mug. But then he became agitated. Herold said she gave him some Xanax. He took the house keys and let himself out the door. Herold tried, and failed, to corral him back inside, then called a friend, Charla Nash, who knew Travis well, to come to her aid.
Nash approached the house as she had many times before, but this time her hair was newly cut and dyed. Before she reached the front steps, Travis snapped. Or simply reverted to his authentic, primal self, the one that might have preferred red colobus monkey brain to fish and chips. Or feared an intruder. Or protected his home turf with sharp fangs. The chief detective estimated that the attack on Nash lasted 12 minutes, during which Herold tried to save her friend, taking a shovel and beating Travis, then going into the kitchen and returning with a butcher knife, which she used to stab him - the "son" who once combed her hair - three times in the back, none of which kept Travis from inflicting grievous injuries on Nash. The 911 call, made by Herold, who eventually locked herself in a car just a few feet away from where her friend lay on the driveway, was later heard by millions of people around the world as the story went viral.
"Oh, my God, he ripped her face off," Herold screams to the sounds of Travis waa-barking in the background. "I'm afraid he'll break into the car," she says, hyperventilating. Then she moves from stark terror to existential resignation. She catatonically repeats: "It don't matter. It don't matter. It don't matter."
When the police arrived, Travis approached the passenger side of one of the cruisers and, when he couldn't enter, lopped off the rearview mirror, then shuffled around to the driver's side, where he ripped the door open and rushed the police officer. Pinned by the console and his computer, the officer reached across his body for his Glock, then fired three times into the chimpanzee's chest, which caused Travis to lumber off, almost as if perfectly fine, circling the property while losing pints of blood, then re-entering the house, where he finally lurched to his enclosure at the back and, with his arm reaching one last time for his sleeping platform, died.
Afterward, the ghost of Travis appeared everywhere. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, prohibiting the sale of apes, monkeys and lemurs, while Connecticut and Oregon joined the other 39 states that regulate or ban ownership of dangerous exotic pets. Meanwhile, a news account claimed that Travis's mother, Suzy, had also been shot and killed in a violent encounter in April 2001. ("The banana doesn't fall far from the tree," the article began.) After numerous operations, Nash later unveiled her reconstructed face on "Oprah" to audible gasps from the audience. (Nash has filed a lawsuit that questions Herold's actions before the attack.) Finally, Morgan Fairchild told a television news show: "This is not at all the personality I worked with. . . . It is a sin that this animal had to be destroyed."
But the chief detective didn't see it like that, sitting in his office, approaching the one-year anniversary of Travis's death. He said that the officer who reflexively shot Travis was an animal lover himself and had trouble sleeping or eating afterward, taking time off from the force. He said that no matter what you thought about her strange interspecies relationship with Travis, Herold acted heroically in trying to save her friend. (In an interview with the "Today" show, Herold described the eerie moment after stabbing Travis: "He looked at me, like, 'Mom, why'd you do that?' ")

But, most of all, the chief detective remembered moving through the house that day with three other officers, all with their weapons drawn, following the trail of blood, even as Nash's mutilated body lay in the driveway, uncertain if Travis was alive or not. Through the living room; down the hall; another room; another hallway narrowed by boxes. The silence was like a primal thrum, the eerie frangibility of everything - the window curtains, the reflection in the mirror - hung in the balance.
"We were not dealing with a human suspect," the chief detective said. "Anything could have happened."
Michael Paterniti, a GQ correspondent, is the author of "Driving Mr. Albert."

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