“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..
