Chimp Crazy, a four-part HBO documentary series, revolves around Tonia Haddix and Tonka, a 250-lb primate who she’s trying to protect in Missouri. Her life spins out of control after PETA files a lawsuit to take the animal and move him to a sanctuary. The series is directed by Eric Goode of Tiger King fame. Like that pandemic-era series, here Goode explores the ethical and moral problems that result when people try to domesticate wild animals.
Goode says that when directing Tiger King, he discovered so-called monkey moms, who he never heard of before, despite his extensive knowledge of animals and their caretakers.
“There's a similarity with these women, where they either are empty nesters or didn't have children at all,” he describes. “And they want a child forever, and they want to raise it and play with it, almost the way you would play with your Barbie dolls, or the way you might raise a child to be a beauty pageant contestant. There's this perverse relationship that occurs. They want a child that doesn't talk back.”
Raising a chimp is generally safe until they turn 4 or 5 years old — when they “become very strong and unmanageable in many cases.” Goode says they must remain in a cage and can’t go into the public like they did at ages 1-3.
Then around age 8, their hormones (especially testosterone) change, so they start to lash out, and be unpredictable and dangerous.
“I interviewed many people that kept tigers, and everyone would always say to me, ‘I'd rather have 100 tigers than one chimpanzee.’ Chimpanzees are just so incredibly smart. You can't lock them in a cage with a combination lock, because they'll sit there all day and figure that combination lock out and escape.”
He notes that in the wild, chimps can render opponents helpless. So when it comes to humans, even in zoos, “They'll typically go after your fingers and bite them off, and then your genitals and your face. And when they go after your face, they usually just try to blind you right away.”
In the series, Tonia Haddix believes this won’t happen to her since she has a special bond with Tonka. She also describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of chimps” because she wears large bleach blonde wigs, goes to the tanning booth weekly, and has permanently tattooed her lips a pink bubble gum color.
However, after the documentary came out, Haddix publicly said she wouldn’t have done it if she knew this was an Eric Goode production. Instead, Goode had hired another person to speak with her.
Goode explains, “So let me be clear on that. So Dwayne Cunningham, who is an ex-Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus clown, I hired Dwayne to do one thing, which is to access a woman in Missouri who is breeding chimpanzees. And we knew that she would not interview with anybody, a journalist — people had tried. … So we hired Dwayne to gain access to this place that was called Missouri Primate Foundation and this woman, Connie Casey. … The woman said no to an interview, but we met Tonia Haddix. Tonia led us into the chimp compound, and we saw the chimps. … Dwayne now has met this woman who loves to talk and wants to tell her story. I had reservations about letting that go on for too long. Arguably, it went on for longer than it should have, where Dwayne was interviewing her, and I wasn't.”
He continues, “But I eventually … I met Tonia, told her that it was my documentary, and Dwayne was working for me. … She said, ‘Oh, I'm even more excited that you're behind it, because maybe you can get this out there to the world, my story.’ … So it's quite disingenuous for her to say now that she wouldn't have talked to me. And it begs the question: Why then would she have talked to me for a year and a half? I still talk to Tonia, by the way. Tonia is a pathological liar. And I like Tonia. And I tell her almost every day to this day, I say, ‘Tonia, this is a chance for you now to really reinvent yourself, and maybe do something really great for primates or chimps that you love so much. Maybe stop lying.’”
In the series, PETA sues Haddix because they think she’s hiding Tonka. While under oath in a legal proceeding, she says to the judge that the chimp died of congestive heart failure. Then she closes her laptop, and as the cameras are still rolling, she admits that Tonka is sitting below her in a cell that she built for him.
“Ultimately, Tonia thought that she could represent herself without a lawyer, and that she was smart enough to outsmart everybody, and the lies just kept building,” Goode says.
He ends up telling PETA that Tonka was in her basement. “I would say to anyone in that situation, ‘What would you have done? What if it was a child? What would you have done in my shoes?’ And I think anyone with any real moral compass would have intervened. Am I supposed to just play by the rules of a documentarian and let her kill this chimpanzee? Because that's when I stepped in.”
A $20,000 reward was out to find Tonka, and Goode says that people in that situation commonly kill the animal so “there’s no problem, it goes away.” He says, “I couldn't have lived with myself had I not done something and she had killed Tonka.”
Tonka then goes to a sanctuary in Florida and seems to thrive. He’s not in a cage, lives with other chimps, and meets a son that maybe he didn’t know he had.
“The primatologist that I would talk to [says] the fact that Tonka … can groom and hang out with those chimps and play and be with his own kind, by far trumps anything that Tonia could have given Tonka. So I'm pretty at peace with where Tonka is today, and I feel that we did the right thing,” explains Goode.
Meanwhile, Haddix still lives in the Ozarks in Missouri, and Goode says he encourages her to go to Africa and see how chimps live in the wild. “She can't provide a chimpanzee with the quality of life that a chimp deserves. … I still really hope and try to get her to understand that.”