Chimp Crazy: The dark side of human-animal bonds exposed in a new streaming series

The charged cultural conversation about pets and children reveals the hidden contradictions of family life. Illustration / James Kerr, Scorpion Dagger, The New York Times

“Monkey love is totally different than the way that you have love for your child,” Tonia Haddix, an exotic animal broker, says at the beginning of Chimp Crazy, the documentary HBO series investigating the world of chimpanzee ownership. “If it’s your natural born child, it’s just natural because you actually gave birth to that kid. But when you adopt a monkey, the bond is much, much deeper.”

Chimp Crazy* arrives in a time of cultural and political obsession about the place of animals in our family lives. When JD Vance became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies” resurfaced, positioning them as adversaries of the traditional family. New York magazine published a special issue questioning the ethics of pet ownership, featuring a polarising essay from an anonymous mother who neglected her cat once her human baby arrived. In the background of these stories, you can hear the echoes of an internet-wide argument that pits companion animals against human children, pet and tot forced into a psychic battle for adult recognition.

These dynamics feel supercharged since 2020, the year when American family life – that insular institution that is expected to provide for all human care needs – became positively airtight. The coronavirus pandemic exaggerated a wider trend toward domestic isolation: pet owners spending more time with their animals, parents more time with their children, everyone less time with one another – except perhaps online, where our domestic scenes collide in a theatre of grievance and stress.

When a cat, a dog or certainly a chimp scampers through a family story, it knocks it off-kilter, revealing its hypocrisies and its harms. In Chimp Crazy, Haddix emerges as the avatar for all the contradictions of the domestic ideal of private home care: She loves her chimp “babies” with such obsession that she traps them (and herself) in a miserable diorama of family life.

Haddix, a 50-something woman who describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of Chimps,” believes that God chose her to be a caretaker. She was a registered nurse before she became a live-in volunteer at a ramshackle chimp-breeding facility in Missouri, where she speaks of a male chimp named Tonka as if she is his mother. Haddix also has two human children; she just loves them less, and says so on television.

As she appoints herself the parent to an imprisoned wild animal, she asserts an idealised form of mothering – one she describes as selfless, unending and pure. Chimp Crazy is the story of just how ruinous this idea of love can be, for the woman and the ape.

As the series continues, it illuminates an underground network of chimp breeders and brokers. Brittany Peet, a lawyer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, describes it as a “culture of almost entirely women who raise chimpanzees and monkeys as if they’re babies”, starkly lonely mother figures who mythologise apes as eternal children who never talk back, never mature and never leave.

Of course, chimps were not meant to live among people at all; it is only the cage that keeps them there. Again and again, Chimp Crazy shows how the human “love” of chimps leads to neglect, abuse and violence. The series is about the folly of loosing a wild animal in the family, but it is also about the void in the family’s centre.

As I watched Chimp Crazy, I read New York magazine’s issue on pet ownership. The cover features a person dressed in full feline costume, holding the bars of a window as if peering out from inside a jail cell, and its pages are dense with slang – “pet parent”, “fur baby”, “starter child” – that suggest that when we are talking about our pets, we are really talking about ourselves. Or at least, our children.

The essay that blew up online, Why Did I Stop Loving My Cat When I Had a Baby?, is an anonymous new mother’s story of how her beloved cat, Lucky, became her postpartum nemesis. As Lucky is recast as a nuisance, she bears the brunt of the author’s frustration and desperation at the overwhelming burden of caring for her first child. In the essay, the mother couches this as a problem of diminished affection. Her online critics scolded her, in a repeated refrain, that “love is not finite”.

Tonia Haddix loves her chimps; the anonymous magazine writer loathes her cat. In each case, animals suffer, and love only confuses the issue. Infinite love is a pretty idea, but caretaking is labour, and the human capacity to work has limits.

Lucky’s owner, who worries that her treatment of her cat makes her a “psychopath”, neglects the cat as she waits for her love to magically return. As I read her story, I wondered if the very expectation that her heart produce the boundless love necessary to fuel superhuman acts of care prevents her from doing right by her pet, and finding Lucky a caregiver who can meet her needs, no sentimental gloss required.

Confining care to the traditional family – which too often means unloading all the caretaking on one woman – does not do justice to either children or their parents, much less the pets. When Vance told Tucker Carlson a few years ago that America is run by “childless cat ladies”, he waged a culture war against any woman who resists this punishing isolated model of care. As Vance later clarified, “I have nothing against cats”: The cat, with its reputation for aloof independence, merely signifies the woman who is free to pursue a public life outside the home.

Vance is not the only one suggesting that women retreat to the home to raise their children with singular obsession. Every few months on X, I’m served evidence of a cultural crosscurrent suggesting that children, and by extension their parents, are unwelcome or unfit for public life. Seared in my memory is an internet fight that broke out last November when a self-described “PetParent” posted about a toddler who ran up to her dog. After blocking the girl with her body, the woman reported that she schooled the girl (“Maybe we don’t run up to dogs we don’t know”) and then schooled her mother: “If she isn’t on voice recall,” the woman said, referring to the mother’s child, “maybe she should be leashed.”

As a child makes her way through the world, she learns through trial and error. Ideally, she encounters neighbours and others who are happy to help. This interaction, whether real or dramatised for maximum attention, instead betrays a condescension toward the child, an unwillingness to recognise her as a person and an eagerness to punish her parent for not controlling her child.

Small child runs up to Zoë. I body block and say, “Maybe we don’t run up to dogs we don’t know.”

The parent: She’s three

Me: If she isn’t on voice recall, maybe she should be leashed? pic.twitter.com/myoDYKDgW5

— AbortionChat (@AbortionChat) November 25, 2023

Dogs often appear in such arguments over the appropriateness of children in public spaces, usually to imply that children ought not appear outside the home until parents have “trained” them to sit, stay and be quiet. In April, a picture posted on X of a chalkboard outside a pub that read “DOG FRIENDLY, CHILD FREE” inspired weeks of snippy back and forth.

When children are cast as lesser dogs, and dogs are mythologised as superior children – more fit for human social life than a whole class of people — I am not sure who wins, but I don’t think it’s the children or the pets. Often, children and pets circulate in these stories like phobic objects, sites of projection where adult humans dump our own unmet needs. As Haddix positions herself to care for a succession of young chimps, she denies their pain and her own in order to fuel her fantasies of domestic bliss.

Feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, in her provocative 2022 pamphlet Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, notes that it can be easier to recognise systems that abuse animals than to see the structures that are failing to serve people. “We don’t hesitate to say that non-human animals are better off outside of zoos, even if alternative habitats for them are growing scarcer,” she writes. Similarly, “the family is doing a bad job at care, and we all deserve better”.

One of the saddest moments in Chimp Crazy is when Haddix’s adult son, Justin, reflects on growing up in a family where an ape was more important than he was. He recalls his mother skipping his school events in order to tend to the urgent needs of her pets. “That’s where the big attraction to these primates comes in,” he says. “They’re like children who never grow up, so they’re constantly going to need her care.”

He is coming to terms with his mother’s own need to be needed. When she is with a primate, “you can just tell she’s happy”, he says. “And I can’t get in the way of that.”

* Chimp Crazy is coming to Neon on September 10

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Amanda Hess

Illustration by: James Kerr

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