City officials tried to evict Moe a few years after his arrival, but the judge ruled for the Davises. Some people in West Covina looked askance at this unconventional domestic situation. Officers headed that way just as the suspect appeared in the yard. He had vanished by the time police arrived, but Moe pointed to next door. The friend went to check and saw a man in a ski mask emerge from a car. He was in his outdoor cage when Davis and a friend heard him rattling the bars and clapping his hands. In 1998, Moe helped apprehend a car thief. Lassie was there, too, and the parrot from “Baretta,” but “the line for Moe was about three times as long as the lines for the others!” There was the time Moe, an occasional performer in sitcoms and commercials, participated in a fund-raiser for Actors and Others for Animals. Moe was in the kitchen, surrounded by new friends, happily snacking on french fries. They returned to an empty car and panicked until someone from a nearby restaurant called to them. The Davises once briefly left him in the car, the door tied shut. Yet the images that stuck were those of soulful, sociable creatures.ĭavis recounts life with Moe in sunny anecdotes that sound like scenes from the goofball comedies of the era. Her later studies would chart more brutal behavior, such as their capacity to engage in systematic warfare. Jane Goodall’s research revealed chimps’ intelligence, sensitivity and uncanny similarities to humans: how they use tools, how they live in families. In tune with everything else going on - the alternative lifestyles, the return to nature - popular culture was filled with lovable primates such as Clint Eastwood’s “Every Which Way but Loose” orangutan, and the chimps in the children’s show “Lancelot Link/Secret Chimp” - comic relievers who mocked the absurdity of the human condition. Southern California in the 1960s and ‘70s was a place where it was perhaps not beyond the pale to welcome a chimpanzee into your family. A pretty normal childhood, as Davis describes it. He loved to watch cowboys and Indians on TV. Moe slept in their bed until he got too big. “You couldn’t turn it off,” all that charm, all that love.Īs 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.įor Davis is here to talk about a terrible thing that happened, an event so traumatic she would be forgiven for not talking about it at all.Īs news of the incident rocketed around the world, Davis fears some people may have come to assume that the chimp that mauled her hand – and attacked her husband with such frenzy that he remains in critical condition two months later, struggling for his life, his face forever disfigured – was Moe.Īnd she wants them to know this: “I wouldn’t change anything about what we did.” “He would reach his hands out and put them around your neck,” says Davis, a sun-creased blonde of 64. This wasn’t just any chimp, they explain patiently. Aren’t they forgetting a part - the point when Davis surely must have thought: This is crazy! A chimp? In our house?!?ĭavis and her mother glance at each other. “Oh … well,” says Davis, with well-practiced delicacy: “Moe … peed on a woman.” All the excitement of the reception, maybe too much punch. “Tell her about … ” interrupts her mother, Terry DeVere. James a couple of years later, Moe was “a combination of flower-thrower and best man,” LaDonna Davis recalls. James, would carry the little fellow in a sling around his chest as he worked at his auto body shop in West Covina, Calif. The boyfriend, a stock-car racer named St. 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. LOS ANGELES - In 1967, LaDonna Davis’ boyfriend went on a trip to Tanzania and came back with quite a surprise: a chimpanzee.
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