Travis the chimpanzee was adorable, a beloved member of Sandy Herold’s family who lived, ate and slept with them… right up until the day he savagely bit a woman’s face.
The injuries were horrific, almost beyond description. Charla Nash, Sandy’s closest friend, was handing Travis a favourite doll when the 13-stone animal grabbed her and sank his teeth into the front of her face.
Ms Nash survived, but she lost her eyes, nose and jaw. ‘My skull was opened up,’ she says, ‘My brains were out. He did a number on me.’
Incredibly, the risk of being maimed or killed does not deter numerous women in the US from owning chimps and treating them as their children. This is a secret sub-culture, one that causes appalling suffering to the animals, which can sell for $60,000 (£45,000) or even more.
Tonia Haddix describes herself as the Dolly Parton of the chimp world and claims to be 53
Ms Haddix began buying monkeys and then started volunteering at a chimpanzee colony
Their world is uncovered in a four-part HBO documentary called Chimp Crazy, available on Sky. Made by Eric Goode, the director of Netflix’s 2020 global hit Tiger King (about the controversial US zookeeper Joe Exotic), it is simultaneously disturbing and grimly hilarious – a piece of film-making that has viewers aghast at the delusional excesses laid bare on the screen.
One of its many surreal elements is the involvement of Hollywood star Alan Cumming, who becomes emotionally and financially committed to saving a middle-aged male chimp called Tonka after working with the animal on a 1997 film called Buddy.
Cumming says of Tonka, who is a seasoned Hollywood performer with appearances in movies such as George Of The Jungle and Babe: ‘I just got to cuddle him all day long. Every morning I’d walk onto the set and he’d run across and leap into my arms.’
At the heart of Goode’s story is Tonia Haddix, who describes herself as the Dolly Parton of the chimp world and claims to be 53. Her face is a mottled mask of plastic and fillers, her breasts are the size of basketballs and she sports an assortment of blonde wigs with corkscrew ringlets.
Several of her on-screen interviews are conducted while she is having treatments, including inch-long eyelash extensions and lip fillers. The beautician manipulates her mouth, squeezing gel around her lips like toothpaste in a tube, while she mumbles to the camera.
Ms Haddix rarely stops talking. One of the crew remarks: ‘She’ll tell anyone anything. When there’s a chance to explain herself, she just can’t help herself.’
This compulsion draws her into some extraordinary confessions – including admissions of perjury and criminal behaviour that could see her sentenced to five years in prison.
And it also leads to a revelation, halfway through the documentary, that will leave viewers questioning everything they have seen.
During much of the film, Ms Haddix is working as a trader in exotic animals, selling baby monkeys and other rare creatures from her home in Missouri on the banks of a reservoir known as Lake of the Ozarks.
Until recently, on her 28-acre grounds, she ran a petting zoo, where visitors were encouraged to cuddle and feed the newborn animals. Some people became so smitten, they bought the creatures as pets. Other buyers phoned from all over the country, responding to her Facebook adverts.
‘Basically’, Ms Haddix tells the camera, ‘I’m the middle man. I can get any animal that you’re looking for. My best year of brokering monkeys so far has been about $350,000 (£267,000) but you can easily make a million dollars a year selling animals.
‘I buy them from private breeding facilities. Any baby that I broker, I usually transport. I don’t trust other transporters to take care of my babies.’
Ms Haddix constantly refers to the animals as her ‘babies’ or ‘children’. The kindest interpretation is that her maternal instinct is overdeveloped to the point of insanity. Married at 19, she had one son and ‘approximately 75 foster kids’.
She was drawn to ‘special needs kids’ and adopted a girl who was born with foetal alcohol syndrome. But when those children reached their teens, Ms Haddix began buying monkeys, and then started volunteering at a chimpanzee colony in Festus, Missouri.
Charla Nash lost her eyes, nose and jaw after she was bitten by her friend’s pet chimp
The 13-stone animal had grabbed her and sunk his teeth into the front of her face
Ms Nash before the mauling happened in Connecticut in 2009
The facility, described by one investigative journalist as ‘a ghastly prison for chimpanzees’ and ‘the equivalent of a puppy farm’, used to specialise in supplying apes for photoshoots and children’s parties.
It was run by reclusive breeder Connie Casey and her husband Mike, who had his nose bitten off by a chimp called Bo in 1992, after he went into the animal’s cage to give it ice cream.
Connie retrieved the body part and surgeons reattached it but, Mike later said, the graft ‘didn’t take’. He was left with a nose like a flattened sausage roll.
Ms Haddix says Connie Casey is ‘basically responsible for three-quarters of the captive-bred chimps in the US’ – and she means that as a compliment. ‘She’s lived a life I would have loved to live.’
After volunteering to help look after the 40 apes in cramped cages at Casey’s farm warehouse, Ms Haddix began living there full-time. She became particularly obsessed with one gentle and lonely chimp… former cinema star Tonka, by then in his 30s.
All the chimps had a taste for fast food. Ms Haddix went to McDonald’s to collect bulk orders of Happy Meals, feeding them chips and chicken nuggets through the bars. Sometimes she would hold chips between her teeth and let Tonka take them from her mouth by kissing her.
Cumming had no idea, he says, that Tonka was living in such squalid captivity. ‘My understanding was he retired to Palm Springs, Florida. I always thought of Palm Springs as old people and gay people… and then retired chimps were added to that list.’
One of her chimps, Tonka, now lives in an animal sanctuary
Actor Alan Cumming is committed to saving Tonka and appears in the HBO documentary
The animal activist group Peta campaigned for years to close the Festus colony and move the chimps to a spacious wildlife reserve. Ms Haddix fought through the courts to prevent this, but lost.
‘I love those chimps more than anything in the world,’ she told reporters tearfully after the hearing, ‘and I mean more than anything, more than my kids’.
But when Peta’s vets came to sedate the chimps and take them away, one was missing – Tonka.
Ms Haddix claimed the animal had died, and that she and her husband cremated its body. She produced a small bag of sandy dust as proof. Peta’s lawyers didn’t believe this for a moment, but in another court hearing – held online in January 2022 – Ms Haddix swore on oath that Tonka was dead.
‘I kept saying, “Talk to me,” but he didn’t respond,’ she sobbed. ‘He didn’t breathe so I went ahead and poked him with a long PVC pipe. His arm just kind of flopped. So I opened the cage door – and he was dead!’
Despite her wailing, the evidence was an outright lie… because at that moment, Tonka was downstairs in a windowless basement of her home, behind a wall of thick Perspex.
After the success of Tiger King, director Goode knew that no one in the paranoid world of exotic animal breeding would trust him to film their lives. So he hired a sub-contractor, a man he called his ‘surrogate director’: Dwayne Cunningham, a children’s entertainer who had spent much of his career around performing animals.
Cunningham proved almost as eccentric as Ms Haddix, sometimes working on the documentary while wearing his clown costume and make-up, complete with red nose.
Ms Haddix quickly grew to trust him, so much that she let him see how she cared for Tonka. The woman and her ‘chimp baby’ would sit for hours together, watching clips of apes on TikTok and YouTube. Sometimes, she claimed, the animal came upstairs to lounge in her sitting room and look out of the window.
But she was increasingly concerned that Peta would obtain a warrant to raid her home. If she was found with the stolen chimp, after swearing to a judge that the animal was dead, she could face years in prison.
Her solution was as shockingly selfish as anything in the entire documentary.
She intended to have Tonka euthanised, she told Cunningham. At that point, he and Goode felt compelled to intervene, and informed Peta’s lawyers.
It has to be said that, while Ms Haddix is wildly irrational and emotional, she comes across as a sympathetic character – needy, but mostly sincere. The people at Peta, on the other hand, are obnoxious: self-righteous and fanatical, certain of their right to impose their judgments on other people.
Despite the ever-present danger of attack, Ms Haddix is still obsessed with primates
Peta’s lawyer, Jared Goodman, is particularly smug, and a trifle ridiculous behind his desk with his bare ankles on display in shoes without socks.
Happily, Tonka was rescued and now lives at an accredited animal sanctuary in Florida.
Near the end of the film, Cumming goes to see him, though the visit is an anticlimax. The chimp doesn’t give him so much as a glance.
His commitment to Tonka’s welfare is genuine, however: when Peta was trying to find out where the chimp was, Cumming put up a $10,000 reward for information.
Florida is also home to Pam Rosaire, from Circus City in Sarasota. She has been a chimp trainer all her life, and once performed with an animal called Toto in the White House, at a party for President Richard Nixon’s daughter, Trixie.
‘Animals that have grown up entertaining, they enjoy it,’ Ms Rosaire insists. ‘Peta don’t know what the real deal is. Once these animals retire, what are they going to do all day? They don’t last long. They’re my kids. And they’re always going to be my kids.’
Ms Rosaire is so devoted to her chimps that, when one was born two months premature at the same time as her daughter Dallas, she breastfed them both together. ‘I did what came natural. He’s a baby that needs feeding – feed it.’
Her husband Roger Zoppe remembers, ‘I come in one day and she’s got Dallas on one booby and the chimp on the other. I go, “Whoa, what you doing?”’
Baby and chimp grew up together, almost as twins. ‘We were like brother and sister,’ Dallas says, ‘so much that the instant a boy would like me, he would be mean to that boy, and throw poop at him.’
Ms Rosaire’s last chimp was called Chance, because, ‘It was my last chance to have a baby at my age.’
Chimp Crazy includes home video of the animal beside itself with excitement, watching Planet Of The Apes with the couple in their home cinema. Chance died suddenly at 15, the age when male chimps usually become unmanageable as pets.
In Pendleton, Oregon, a chimp called Buck was 17 when he escaped from his cage and attacked his owner’s daughter. The woman suffered horrific bites to her legs and torso, with chunks torn out ‘like a shark bite’, said her brother.
The owner, an alcoholic named Tamara Brogiotti, had always refused to give up the chimp to a sanctuary. She dressed Buck in her late husband’s clothes, watched TV with him while she got drunk on Scotch, and even allowed him to sleep with her.
But as Buck got bigger, he led a miserable existence, with a shock collar and chain round his neck. Ms Brogiotti claimed she was building an outdoor enclosure for him, but it was never finished.
When Buck attacked her 50-year-old daughter April, Ms Brogiotti called the police. ‘He’s got to be put down,’ she demanded. ‘We’re both locked in the basement and I can’t get out to get my own gun. You’re going to have to do a head shot.’
A sheriff’s deputy shot Buck dead with a rifle through a window.
Despite all the distress she has suffered and the ever-present danger of attack, Ms Haddix is still obsessed with primates. ‘Monkey love is totally different than the love for your child,’ she says.
But last year when she tried to recreate the bond she had with Tonka, by visiting another owner with an adult chimp, she almost paid with her life.
The animal lunged, dislocating her arm and biting off part of a finger, and well as tearing off half her ear.
‘Every time I go to sleep, I have nightmares over the situation,’ she says. ‘But, ask me today if I would own a chimp, or any kind of primate that could potentially do that to me – 100 per cent yes.’
- All episodes of Chimp Crazy are available on Sky Documentaries and NOW TV
