===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here.

But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And today we have what I think is kind of the platonic ideal of a Scared All The Time episode. It is a topic that is both disturbing and fascinating, disgusting and funny and violent and strange. The fear of getting attacked by a chimpanzee might seem oddly specific, but as we'll discover, I think it's way more justified than being afraid of sharks or plane crashes or whatever else keeps you awake at night. These incredibly intelligent, incredibly strong creatures share about 99% of our DNA, which somehow makes their capacity for insane levels of violence all the more disturbing. It's kind of like looking into a funhouse mirror of humanity and seeing all of our worst impulses reflected back with five times the grip strength and none of the social constraints. What makes chimp attacks particularly horrifying is how personal they get. Unlike a bear that might maul you because your potential food or a snake that bites defensively, chimps often target the most human parts of us. Faces, hands, eyes, and yes, even our genitals. So gurgle your loins because we're about to get into some monkey business, well, technically ape business with our special guest comedian Mike Recine, who has the, as I said, extremely rational fear of getting his penis ripped off by a chimpanzee.

What are we scared?

When are we?

All the time.

Now it is time for Scared All The Time.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us. We're really excited to get to the episode this week with Mike Recine. I apologize in advance. Mike is one of the funniest people on the Internet, and it has been conveyed to me by Ed that I only gave him the saddest stories in the world to work with.

It's true. Me too, by the way. I also had to be like, these are some tough ones to comfortably make fun of.

Listen, it seems like a good idea at the time. I still think it's a really fucking funny episode. But yes, the graphic violence warning goes extra for this one. Some of these stories are pretty tough. Listen. But before we get to that, I do just want to mention that our Patreon is popping off and so is our merch store.

Yeah, both are. We have a full transition now from Supercast to Patreon. Everyone who was a Supercast person, if you haven't checked your email and saw all the stuff I sent you for the transition of it all, check your email.

Ed put together a really nice document to hold your hand and guide you. So we hope to see you over there.

patreon.com/scared all the time. It's open 24 hours a day. You can go there at any point. Look at our stuff. If you're already a member, sign up if you're not. It's never closed.

Again, that's www.patreon.com/scared all the time. One word.

Is anything forward slash?

No, but it just sounds nice.

Okay, fair.

And we hope that you buy some RIP God Bless merch because-

What else I hope? There's too many fucking people buying it. I can't sleep. I'm sitting here making shirts all day.

I hope more people continue to buy it because this show gets more and more fun to record the less sleep that Ed gets.

That's true.

Which is actually the topic of next episode. Oh shit. That's true.

So by that point, the housekeeping will be like, Ed, die. If you didn't get any RIP God Bless shirts, it's because you now have to start saying RIP God Bless Ed.

To Ed. He left me all of the RIP GB shirts in his will. So they all belong to me now. But before we get into the episode, we should do some five star reviews. You guys know him, you love him. If you leave us a five star review, we might read it on the show and we've got some great ones to read you this week. First one is from Cincy Sarah. Five stars, love these guys. This podcast had me hooked from the first listen. I genuinely laugh out loud during every episode. Chris and Ed are both fantastic, but I'm telling you, Ed's sense of humor and quippy remarks have your girl swooning over here.

Oh boy.

The guys have such a good repertoire. I think she means rapport. You will not be disappointed with this one. And Cincy Sarah, we are slightly disappointed in your incorrect usage of repertoire, but Ed is swooning over this review. I don't know why he had me read this one, probably because he would have blushed if he had to do it. But that means-

Secret BTS of this show is I can't read.

Ed, that means he's reading the next one though.

Oh, that must be short. Oh yeah, it is. Okay. This review is from Jenny Jen Jen 457. It sets five stars, obviously. The subject is I get it. And in the body of the review is Chris's generalized anxiety is so relatable, great show, highly entertaining, very swoonable guy.

No, no. I added that last part. Ed added that last part. It's how he feels about me. I'm glad that my lifetime of paranoia and distress has proven to be-

Relatable.

Relatable to all of our listeners. But hey, that's why we do this show.

It would have been cooler if you had accidentally said inflatable, like the previous person. Just get one word wrong.

Maybe I'll get one word wrong in this next five-star review.

We can hope.

Five-star review. Love the show. Just listen to the elevator disaster episode. Although I don't have a fear of elevators, I have reoccurring nightmares about them. Sometimes they go up too fast or down too fast, or falling apart and generally unsafe.

Oh, geez.

Occasionally, they are open platforms on the side of tall building, which plays into my fear of heights. Anyway, great shoe.

Oh, my gosh. She didn't. They didn't. We don't know who DNB 1994 is. They didn't mess it up, did they?

No, I messed it up.

We're having a bit of fun this week.

I'm just keeping the trend going.

I love it. And I should say, before we start the episode, Cincy Sarah, we're just having a bit of fun. We don't care that you said repertoire when you meant to say rotisserie.

With that.

Yeah, with that. Now that we've lost the only people who liked us as fans, we'll go into Chimp Attacks.

With Mike Recine, everybody.

Enjoy.

Okay. So like I said, we have an insane show today, even by our standards. And for that, we have our guest to thank. You might know him from his brand new podcast Recine Time, or his old podcast Out For Smokes, or his very funny YouTube special, I'm Normal. Or you might know him from his appearances on Conan, Stavi's World, Come Town, The Tim Dillon Show, Chappo Trap House, The Adam Friedland Show, or a thousand other podcasts. Or maybe you don't know him at all yet. That's cool too. You're gonna know him now. Today, we are joined by one of my favorite comedians and podcasters, Mike Recine. Mike, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Like always, we have a guest on the show. I asked Mike for some of his fears to see what we could base the episode around. And usually we get some pretty general responses, but one of Mike's that he threw in the email was getting his penis ripped off by a chimpanzee. And I was like, fantastic. Obviously that's the one we're doing. So before we dive into that though, Mike, if you want to fill our listeners in on who you are, and if you want to tell them what you're doing with your new podcast, I listened to the first episode, but I haven't fully caught up yet. It seems different than some of what you've done in the past. Thanks.

Yeah, it's, it's fun. I tell people about it and I go, oh, I'm doing a podcast. It's a little different. And they go, oh, okay. Yeah. I'm sure you are. I'm sure everybody thinks that their podcast is a little different. But yeah, I'm having fun. It's I feel like it's kind of like part sitcom, part talk show, part variety show and part podcast. So I have like some characters come in and I'm sort of, I'm trying to build out sort of a world of peripheral characters and, and stuff like that. And yeah, like there's like my friend's girlfriend plays a hooker, who's like a regular co-host on the show. And then like the head writer of the show is like the cleaning lady that works in the building. So it's just, I'm just kind of going, I'm just kind of figuring out as I go and hoping that, you know, people enjoy it and people watch it.

That's awesome. See what characters stick. People want, you know, I want to hear more from the hooker. I want to hear more from the-

See who could come back and then see who we, who we give the boot to. See who gets released from the show.

That'll be an audience voting.

Yeah.

I think that's how the hooker thing started, right? Because she was on one of the last episodes of the other podcast, and then you brought her back for this, right?

Yeah. I don't know how it happened, but she's just really good. I was like, can you come in and play a hooker? She understood the assignment, as the kids say.

Yeah.

It's cool figuring out, and then we build this character a little bit, figure out who she is, where it goes. We brought her boyfriend on, we had her dad on last week.

These are the characters' boyfriends and dads, or literally the actress' boyfriend?

It's her boyfriend in real life, but he played a character, and then another friend of mine played her dad. So it's kind of fun. You're like, what's the story that we're doing here?

That's awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time to come on this. It sounds like you're really busy creating whole worlds.

Yeah, I am. Yeah, but that's okay. I'm home alone so much during the day. I just drink coffee and pace around my house. So it's good to have someone to talk to.

That's awesome. Yeah. That sounds like you and I are the same that way. Chris, now you have a kid there, so now you have... Your life is different.

My life is different. It's changing very, very rapidly, but it's enjoyable now that I'm past the first two weeks. It's getting a little bit more enjoyable.

Would you leave your kid with a chimp?

Absolutely not, although we will meet some people in this episode who either treated their chimp like a child or did leave their kid with a chimp. And I can't imagine leaving my kid with a cat just because they're kids. And even if you have a nice animal, if a kid screams or moves wrong, that's it.

Yeah, my dog bit my baby's face when he was like 10 months old, and I still feel kind of bad about it, obviously.

Oh my god.

How old is the kid now?

He's three and a half.

Okay. Is there any thing where you can see in his eyes that he hates dogs and stuff now?

No, they're like best buddies now.

Okay. That's good. That doesn't always work out that way. I'm not friends with any of the people who I've attacked.

Okay.

Yeah, not anymore.

I got jumped on by a dog once as a kid. It didn't even bite me, but I didn't remember it happening. But when I grew up, I had a weird, I never really liked dogs very much. My mom one day a few years ago was like, I wonder if it has anything to do with that time you were buckled in the back seat of the car and that dog jumped in there and started barking at you. I was like, I mean, yeah, it could definitely have something to do with that.

A strange dog jumped into your car?

Yeah. Apparently, I was in the back seat and my mom was putting groceries in the car or something. Yeah. Some dog ran across the parking lot. Nice. It jumped in the back seat. And she said it wasn't trying to attack me, but it was just something got it, maybe a stuffed animal we had or something, like something got it worked up and it was just in the back seat going nuts. I don't remember it.

But the last time you mentioned that story on the show, it was the most emails we ever got about like, you dog hating pieces of shit.

So yeah, we did have some. We did have people get kind of upset. I was like, no, I don't have a problem with dogs. I had a problem with one very specific dog as a child. It was on an episode about, so we did an episode on being eaten alive because that's an intrusive thought that I have. And I think it may have something to do with dogs and everything. So this is a nice kind of episode to pair with being eaten alive because it's a much more specific kind of fear. And I guess a good place to start with it is, I don't know, Mike or Ed, have either of you guys ever had like a close encounter with a monkey or a chimp or are you an animal lover or not? Or what triggered this fear? Did it come from anywhere specific?

Well, it's Mike's fear.

So I don't know.

That's his trigger. I mean, I could start and say that as far as fucking apes and monkeys and stuff go, no, I've never run into any in the wild. I'm from Connecticut. There's a very famous chimp attack there that might come up this episode. But no, personally, never fucking never dealt with it. Mike, why are you afraid they're going to grab your dick?

No, I don't know. It just seems like the worst thing that could happen to you.

It really does. I mean, they are. There is something about the fact that it would almost be like having a small man rip your genitals off.

A thousand percent. That's so true. I was just thinking that because I watched this video the other day that was like a monkey. I'm just going to say monkey. I don't know what the proper terms are.

So they're apes. They're technically apes.

But I'm going to go ahead and say monkey because I'm talking about a video that's unrelated to this and I can't identify.

Sure.

So this ape, monkey, chimp, what have you, it's like at the zoo. Have you seen it where it's like telling the person it wants the fruit snacks in her like purse?

No.

So this monkey is at the zoo and it's through the glass and it's fucking so human it's crazy. It could be like a human in a fucking monkey suit.

Yeah.

The woman's not understanding. So it starts to figure out a way to communicate to her. Like, I want the shit in your bag. Eventually gets the thing out that he wants. Now he's like taking her. He's like, okay, walk this way for, there's no video component. I'm pointing. It's like, walk this way. And then they have to walk to the end where the monkey knows there's like an opening in the fence. It's so crazy. It's like there are-

Does it get them? Does it get the fruit snacks?

It gets the fruit snack.

Oh shit. All right.

Yeah. They're little people. Like I can probably, you know that scene in Goodfellas I always talk about where it's like, hey, the dresses are down there and Karen gets all scared, doesn't want to, like if a monkey did that, I would follow the monkey to the dresses and then be fucking, my face ripped off.

Imagine one day, like you really need a babysitter and you like, you don't have anybody, all your regular people don't show up and you find somebody from like an agency or like a friend of a friend. And then it's not so you're like out with your wife that you realize you hired a monkey in a dress because they were like, you just pay me in bananas.

Oh my God, it's a banana based economy. That is funny you say that because in the way that Chris has in his brain and probably your baby as well, this like fear of dogs, that's just intrusive thoughts. We were, we grew up with the number 90s kids and it just seemed like there were so many fucking monkeys have jobs movies in the 90s. We've been trained into like Dustin Chexin, that movie with Harvey Keitel where he has a monkey. Like there was so many like monkeys are our friends movies.

There's a Harvey Keitel in a monkey movie?

Yeah, but it's one of those little monkeys, like a Thailand monkey and he trains it to steal for him.

Okay, I've never, I don't know that movie off the top of my head. I do, it's interesting you say that because my, I did have, when I was a kid, I was very afraid of monkeys and I don't really know why, but my family had, the thing that triggered it somehow for some reason was this VHS tape that had a bunch of kids songs on it. And one of them was about delivering the mail and it was a whole bunch of monkeys dressed up as mailmen, swinging around trees like with mail bags and stuff. And it scared the shit out of me.

Oh wow.

And then when I got, you know, up until like five or six or whatever, where I was kind of skittish about monkeys, I did feel monkey grip strength once. And it was from one of those little monkeys that Harvey Keitel trained to steal. I went to an animal sanctuary in San Diego in like 2010. And there was this place called Mostly Monkeys that supposedly was run by someone who used to work for the San Diego Zoo. I'd be curious why they used to work for the San Diego Zoo. Because I'm sure there's a story there. But they had a bunch of the little Capuchin monkeys that they had rescued, I think from a lab or something. And they would give you grapes and marshmallows to feed to the monkeys. And the monkey, I reached in like to give it the marshmallow and it missed the marshmallow, kind of knocked to the ground and it grabbed my finger. And he was really not happy that the finger didn't have a marshmallow in it anymore. And he started squeezing my hand and like pulling on it. And it was in that moment, I understood how strong a chimpanzee must be. Cause that guy's hand is like the size of a newborn's hand. But it felt like he was gonna crush my finger. It was insane.

That's shit, man. That's a good segue too.

Yeah, imagine like your mailman is a monkey and he shows up at your house with one letter and you open it up and it just says, give me bananas or your family dies.

It's like, how did he cut out all these little letters from fucking a magazine?

And arrange them so specifically. Yeah. Well, you put a thousand chimps in a room with a thousand magazines and eventually they'll cut out Shakespeare in a very threatening manner.

Yeah.

But Ed, were you going to segue to something off of that?

Yeah, which is, I forgot it now.

Okay.

But it was just about that monkey strength is unusual because it's like pull up based.

Yes.

Because they're always pulling themselves up trees. So I feel like if a monkey punched you directly in the face, you might be like, that's a weak monkey. But if it grabbed your face and pulled you, that might be where all of its fucking muscles are.

Right. Yeah. So one of the places I wanted to start with this, besides our general rule of one of the reasons that chimp attacks on humans happen so often, is that Ed and I generally have a rule on this show that if an animal can kill you, you need to treat it like it will kill you, or at some point the worst will happen. And people don't think of chimps that way because they do seem more human and friendly at times, but they only need to be scared once and they will fuck you up. But the other place that I wanted to start was the actual where this chimp strength come from. Because somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought that they were like 8 to 10 times stronger than people.

What is that, a fucking ant?

No, well, so it turns out when I looked it up, because originally I wrote that down and then I was like, I should probably check that. It turns out that that's what the numbers used to be. Likely based on experiments from the 1920s when a researcher by the name of John Bowman recorded a chimp at the Bronx Zoo pulling 847 pounds with one hand.

Wow.

Jesus. Which, I don't know how, I don't know if this John Bowman guy was like an actual scientist or if he was just a crazy guy with a chimp that was trying to break a record or something, but no one has since recorded chimps being that strong. I found an article on, well, Ed, it's another one of those websites where it's like, I'm not entirely sure why this website has this information, but I found an article on ultimatekilimanjaro.com, which does seem to be a fairly comprehensive website for information on climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, and then they also have some information on chimpanzees. So according to this article, chimps are about one and a half to two times stronger than the average human. And when it comes to tasks like pulling or jumping, a chimpanzee's strength is specialized for their arboreal lifestyle, which as you mentioned, like swinging through the trees, gripping branches, navigating uneven terrain. So while a chip could likely lift or pull around 150 to 200 pounds, lifting heavier objects off the ground is not something that they can realistically do. But the disparity in strength isn't because of pure muscle mass. According to a 2019 study from researchers at the University of Arizona, direct tests of muscle fibers actually found many similarities between our cells and chimps. And in terms of static strength and contraction speed, human muscle fibers kept pace with chimp muscles. But humans tend to favor a type of muscle fiber called MHC that apparently allows for greater endurance and reduced energy consumption, even though those fibers are not as strong. Chimpanzee muscles, though, are more evenly balanced with less efficient but powerful MHC 2 muscle fibers, which are the kind that come in handy when swinging around. So, technically, the net result is that pound for pound, their muscles are more powerful, even though they can't lift super heavy objects. And it also means that chimps didn't really evolve to be stronger than us. We sort of evolved to be weaker.

Oh.

That we weren't always this way.

We evolved to be podcasters.

Yeah. Exactly. Once we realized we could sit, we said, fuck the tree climbing, let's get a microphone out. Yeah.

And do you think that guy from the 1800s, Bowman or whatever, was like the weakest of the bunch, which is why he thought this little bit of strength was eight times stronger than a man?

Yeah.

Because he was just like a little olive oil-bodied little man. Probably. I don't mean olive oil-bodied like us Italians. I mean like olive oil Popeye's girlfriend.

Oh yeah. Just like a skinny little stick man. I don't know. I don't know what his deal was. He definitely wasn't, I don't mean in the 1920s, if you were doing experiments on chimpanzees, I feel like the track record for the kinds of people that were doing that were all probably very odd. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not that chimps evolved to be stronger than us. It's that we actually evolved to be weaker. Researchers think we began getting weaker roughly eight million years ago when our lineage diverged from chimpanzees. We started developing larger brains that sucked energy away from muscles and selected for these more economical muscle fibers. As we became bipedal, muscles primed for endurance would have also went out as our ancestors began walking long distances on their migrations across the globe. So it was our brains and our legs that played this role in our eventual global domination, but also our role in becoming very weak compared to our chimpanzee cousins.

Sure.

That's how we ended up with 8 billion people on the planet. And there's only, I think, I think it was 300,000 chimps left in the wild. So.

Seems low.

We fucking won.

Oh, shit.

Take that, chimps.

Yeah, but what's the point if you're weak?

Yeah.

What's the point if you have little muscles? What's the point of when you go to the zoo, your wife starts looking at the chimp? And licking her lips.

It's like, I married a chimp and now look what you've become.

Yeah.

You don't rip anyone's dicks off anymore.

Right. When we got married, you were built like a chimpanzee.

Yeah.

Now you're built like a person who researchers chimpanzees. Yeah.

The other really dangerous component to chimp strength is their grip, which is five times stronger than a human. So their strength is like one to two times, but their grip is five times stronger. Most people can apply somewhere between 65 to 105 pounds per square inch, and chimps can reach up to 700 PSI, which is enough to shatter your bones or wrench joints from straight out of their sockets.

Jesus.

Yeah. So all of the strength, their different muscles, their grip strength, that's one reason they're so dangerous. The other reason, like I said, is because they're so easy to humanize. Even though we think of big cats or bears or hippos as cute on some level, it's easier to remember that they are massive wild animals that could kill you even by accident. It's harder to see that with chimps. When we look at chimps, we see a little reflection of us. And there's good reason for that. Like I said at the top, we are 99.8% genetically identical, making chimps and also bonobos our closest cousins in the wild. And I think that similarity is what takes it beyond cute to just almost like a longing to understand chimpanzees. It's like it's why people go to such great lengths to keep them in their homes, even though you wouldn't necessarily do that with a bear or something.

Like Michael Jackson? Like with Bubbles?

Well, Bubbles or the Connecticut Attack, which I actually... We have one big long chimp attack at the end of this episode that we're going to talk about that's not the Connecticut one. But there's a bunch of... There was just an HBO documentary, I think the people that made Tiger King might have made it, about a lady who basically kidnapped a chimpanzee that she felt she was the protector of. And even though they tried to shut down the facility that it was in, it went missing the night before it was supposed to be evacuated from the facility. And turns out this lady just took it and kept it in her basement.

Oh my god. Here's a picture, by the way, of Travis, the one that from Connecticut, holding a baby.

See, yes, that should not be allowed.

This is literally Mike's being like, I got the cheapest daycare we can and this arrived.

He looks like a guy who doesn't realize the kid's not his. Yeah.

He does. He's holding it like a proud parent.

Some lady tricked them.

Yeah, totally tricked them. Won't do a paternity test.

Oh my god.

This is so insane because you can see just over his shoulder, there is a fucking abused animal. Looks like an indoor trampoline, an abused ass like stuffed animal. So if that's what he plays with, looks like I wouldn't hand him your baby.

Yeah, he just he just finished throwing that against the walls.

Yeah.

And into the ceiling and they're like, here Travis, hold this thing.

You can find the picture they're looking at in the show notes under Travis, The Baby Holding, Face Snatching, Documentary Starring Chimp.

So yeah, I think it's our similarity to the chimps that both makes us want to know them and it's also part of what makes chimp attacks on humans so tragic. The violence itself lives in this uncanny valley where it seems like there should be some understanding or mercy but there isn't. It's just an animalistic cruelty dished out by a monster with human eyes. I found one chimp attack story from a guy named Andrew Oberle who was working at a chimp sanctuary in South Africa when he was attacked by two male chimpanzees who escaped their enclosure and his first person recounting of this story is a great example of the specific kind of terror that I'm talking about when when I say that it feels like you should be able to get them to stop.

Hi there, sorry to pop up again so soon, but here's an important piece of trivia before we get into the first story. Ed finished the episode too late to get Mr. Disclaimer to record anything for the show, so now it's up to me, Trivia Bot, to inform you that chimp attacks are gross and horrific. It is impossible to talk about them without being graphic, and each story seems more graphic and horrific than the last. Everyone at Scared All The Time's hearts go out to all those affected, much more than it sounds like in this episode's recording.

So Andrew says, I don't know why they did it. Maybe they saw me as a threat invading their territory, trying to steal their girlfriends.

Sounds like maybe you do know then.

Maybe they just wanted to show all the humans that were with us who were the real bosses of the reserve. Who knows? Chimps are chimps. Full grown adult male chimps are especially dangerous, especially smart, and could be very, very aggressive. What made it even worse for me was that I knew these chimps. I cared about them. And that's why I was actually there at that sanctuary because I wanted to do everything I could to make sure these chimps had the best lives they possibly could. So as they were holding me down, biting at me, tearing at my flesh, all I could do was scream and yell, Nicky, Amadeus, stop it. Please don't. Which is tragic, but also Nicky and Amadeus are wild names for chimpanzees, I feel like. None of that worked. I didn't think they'd ever stop. It felt like an eternity. If I close my eyes, I can still actually feel Nicky's hot breath on my face right before he bit off my nose. And I can see Amadeus' big white eyes and his big white teeth as he bit fingers one by one, almost like in a This Little Piggy Went to Market type fashion.

Oh my God.

Yeah, I'm sure the lady chimps were real impressed. I hope that felt good.

You know, the lady chimps are like, we could rip a man apart too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Unreal.

When my pleas didn't work, I tried fighting back, but I didn't have any luck. They nearly killed me.

Now, chimps, they speak fucking sign language, right?

Some of them.

Probably.

So, I mean, if you remove his fingers, that's basically silencing them.

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

They don't want to hear it, is what they're saying.

Silence in this case is literally violence. The aftermath of this attack is almost as horrifying as the attack itself. Andrew goes on to say, I was rescued from the scene and rushed to a small emergency medical clinic where I nearly bled out. The doctors had to use 25 units of blood just to keep me going while they addressed all my wounds. I lost a lot of my scalp, both of my ears and most of my fingers. I lost my nose. I had a nasty gash on the side of my face, a collapsed lung and I went in and out of septic shock several times. Both of my wrists were torn up, my elbow, my back end, my legs. I lost over half my right foot and all the toes on my left foot.

Do you think the toes were also the fucking piggies go to market situation?

Maybe.

Oh my God.

You think the way, I mean, when you list it out like that, it doesn't sound like there's much left.

And they got to give those chimps the electric chair, right?

Yeah.

Fucking down with these fucking monkeys.

Yeah. I wonder what their last mule was.

Might have been him.

Yeah, more of Andrew. He's one of the lucky ones.

Well, you said you have a picture of this guy?

Well, I looked up a picture of him. I don't have one to throw up on the screen here for you. But in my mind, anyone who survives a chimp attack looks like that lady from Nope, where it's just the gauze or the little veil over her face. But he actually looks pretty normal. They were able to reconstruct him with a mix of surgery and prosthetics.

Shit, dude, South Africa.

That'd be fun if you're on a dating website and you have old photos, you show up to a date, and you're like, you have no nose.

So, a couple things happen between then and now. Yeah.

Holy shit. Yeah.

You're like, well, you're actually a little heavier.

I mean, look, they say the camera adds 10 pounds. I'm seeing 15 clearly.

Yeah.

I mean, although I guess that guy's lucky that his eyes survived.

What about the dick? Did he go for the dick?

The dick remained, I believe, in this attack. He says his back end was torn up. So, I assume they ripped it his ass, but it seems like they were so busy biting off his fingers and toes that I think his dick survived.

See, if I were one of those chimps, I'd be like, can my last meal be a hundred bananas? I would eat them really slow over the course of three days.

Is there maniacal chimps, dude?

And then leave the peels out to see if the guards will slip on them and you can get out. Yeah.

I mean, did you watch the newer Planet of the Apes movies, the like modern ones? Because the first one with fucking Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter, he plays essentially this guy's character, like works at like a chimp sanctuary and they're all mean to him and stuff, mean to the chimps.

Oh, I do vaguely, yes.

And so as soon as this guy's story started, I'm like, I saw Planet of the Apes, you definitely were hitting on their girlfriends and fucking spraying them with hoses.

Yeah.

Well, so hang on a second. I just looked up because Mike, he said we should give him the electric chair. That made me wonder, have we ever, have we ever executed an ape? Because I forget if it was something we talked about on the show or not, but I was reading somewhere.

Well, they executed animals, talked about in the show, like they executed farm animals, and they brought them to court and stuff.

Yes, they executed a pig once. Yeah. So I just looked up if they've ever executed a monkey, and it looks like-

Firing squad?

No. They hung a monkey in Hardlepool, England, although this seems like it may be a legend. Hardlepool is known by many as the place where a monkey was mistaken for a French spy and hanged. But this is from the BBC. This isn't like a Weekly World News story. It seems like, holy shit, okay. One stormy day during the Napoleonic Wars, a French ship was wrecked off the coast of an old fishing village clinging to the northeast coast of England. The only survivor was the ship's mascot, a thing I didn't know ships had, a monkey that was washed ashore. The people of Hardlepool had never seen a monkey before, nor for that matter had they ever set eyes on a Frenchman. Mistaking its chattering for the language of the enemy, they convicted the monkey of being a French spy and hanged the animal on the beach. The townsfolk became known as the monkey hangers, which is not a term that I feel like anybody wants staining their past. And what was once a term of mockery would become a proud part of Hardlepool's history. So they're proud monkey hangers.

I wouldn't be very proud of it. Yeah, you should erase this. You should do everything in your power to erase this story. You're fucking trading places, someone. Remember, like, he's dressed like a monkey in trading places, and he ends up getting put in with that other monkey?

Like, yeah, we also got Panera Bread, so. Yeah.

The town's football club's monkey mascot, Hangus...

Stop it...

.was even elected as Hardlepool mayor not once, but three times.

This town fucking sucks.

Yeah.

This town's a mess.

Yeah. And their logo, or like the Hardlepool Rovers Rugby Club, is a questionable image of a monkey being hung from their name. So, yikes.

We'll get us all shirts. We'll order some shirts, but let's move on to the next story.

Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. So, if we're so similar to chimps, how are we so different? And according to the American Museum of Natural History, each human cell, some more science, each human cell contains roughly 3 billion base pairs or bits of information. Just 1.2% of that equals about 35 million differences. Some of these have a big impact, others don't, and even two identical stretches of DNA can work differently. They can be turned on in different amounts, in different places, or at different times. A gene's activity or expression can be turned up or down like the volume on a radio, so the same gene can be turned up high in humans, but very low in chimps. The same genes are expressed in the same brain regions in human, chimps and gorillas, but in different amounts. And thousands of differences like these affect our development and function and help explain why the human brain is larger and smarter. This led me to a very funny side note about why bonobos are less popular than chimps at zoos and stuff, even though they're basically the same animals. And apparently bonobos solve most of their societal difficulties through sex multiple times a day with whichever other bonobos are around. So zoos over the years have said no thank you to all of that. And chimps became more popular.

Wow. Now I need to know, was it bonobos or chimps where that guy was hitting on all those babes? All those babe monkeys.

Well, I think those were chimps, but you never know, you never know.

It's good to know that chimps are more like me. They're like, I'm tired.

Can't be bothered.

Let's just go to bed.

So for a long time, people also felt that bonobos were less aggressive than chimps. But I found a study from last year that suggests they're actually more aggressive than chimps, at least when it comes to male on male violence. The team that conducted this research said that despite previous studies finding chimpanzees show more severe aggression, such as killings, infanticide, and sexual coercion, the results reveal aggressive acts between males were almost three times more frequent in bonobos than in chimpanzees. So yes, chimpanzees, I guess, big on killings, infanticide, and sexual coercion, but not big fans of male on male violence, I guess.

Interesting.

But for both species, unsurprisingly, more aggressive males had a greater success in mating with females.

Oh, sure. Alpha apes.

Yeah, alpha apes are kind of the gold standard, I feel like, of toxic masculinity.

Are you familiar with the bonobos clothing line, clothing brand?

I've heard of it, yeah.

It's like a high-end-ish clothing line. You go and like everything's done to your size or whatever. I wonder if we can get them for this episode and Alpha Brain. We can do like an alpha male clothing line sponsors all the way through this episode.

And you could ask Home Depot to be like rope strong enough to hang a monkey.

Listen, it's none of your business why. You don't need to know what this means.

Yeah.

All I want to do is have a quiet picnic and hang a monkey from the nearest tree.

Oh, you British, you live in that town. Sometimes you need rope.

God, all I want to do is celebrate my heritage and you get all weird about it. Yeah. Well, not quite the model of gentlemanly chivalry. Male bonobos treated females differently to chimpanzees. The team found male on female aggression was less common and female on male aggression more common. Something the team put down to female bonobos, often outranking males in the social group. So I guess maybe that's also part of where the legend that bonobos were less aggressive maybe came from not quite as detailed studies. But anyway, while it's news that bonobos are so aggressive, we've long known that chimpanzees can be insanely violent. There's a handful of incidents and I'm sure a vast amount of others that have just gone unreported that seem to suggest that when humans get too close to chimps, some kind of territorial violence is almost inevitable. I found a story from National Geographic published in 2020 that detailed what happened to a family in Uganda when they found their farm under siege by a wild band of chimpanzees.

Oh my God.

And it sounds absolutely fucking horrifying. So National Geographic says, life was already hard enough for Netageka Semata and her family scratching out a subsistence on their little patch of garden land along a ridge line in Western Uganda. They could barely grow food for themselves. And now, a group of desperate, bold, crop-rating chimpanzees threaten their livelihood, maybe even their safety.

That's written like a person who doesn't care for chimps. That was a very ugly description of the group.

Yeah. Yeah, just leave a bowl out for them or something.

Yeah.

The chimps had been coming closer for a year or two, prowling all throughout Kamajaka village, searching for food, ripping bananas from the trees, grabbing mangoes and papayas, and whatever else tempted them. They had helped themselves to jackfruit from a tree near the Samada house. But on July 20th, 2014, these scary tribulations gave way to horror. That was the day when a single big chimp, probably an adult male, snatched the Samada family's toddler son and killed him.

Oh no. Okay.

A chimpanzee came in the garden as I was digging, they recalled during an interview in early 2017. Netageka's four young children were with her that day as she combined mothering with hard field work, but she turned her back to get them some drinking water. The chimp saw his chance, grabbed her two year old son by the hand and ran. The boys screaming brought other villagers who helped the mother give chase, but the chimp was rough and strong and the fatal damage occurred fast. Quote, it broke off the arm, hurt him on the head, opened the stomach and removed the kidneys.

Oh my God.

Then, stashing the child's body under some grass, the chimp fled.

Oh, he's embarrassed.

Yeah, he was, I guess he was smart enough to know that this was not going to work out well for him. The kid was rushed to a health center in a nearby town, but the clinic couldn't treat an eviscerated child and died.

I'm not trying to laugh at this, but that clinic has to be like, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?

Yeah. Well, the article says that it was a little clinic, and so then the kid died on route to a regional hospital. But I feel like the regional hospital is not going to have a whole lot more luck with a child who has been opened.

Yeah.

Do they have sharp nails or something?

I think it's just brute strength.

Jesus. That's crazy. I literally had to open something earlier. It was a package of ground turkey, and I was using a knife and I could not pierce this package of ground turkey. I used a butter knife in no one's defense, because I didn't want to wash a better one. But I was sitting there like a fool, trying to push it in. It was the craziest thin plastic I've ever dealt with. We are weaker than monkeys. I'm here to tell you guys, we genuinely have gotten weaker than monkeys.

Yeah. I'm sure their nails are not well-maintained in the wild either. So I'm sure there's some roughness and sharpness or whatever that comes from that. But also he may have used his teeth. I don't know if they say he opened the stomach. It doesn't say if he used his hands.

Yeah.

It is interesting that he was embarrassed and worried because he stashed the kid.

Yeah.

Like he was ashamed. Like he knew what he did was wrong.

Kind of like how Ed should be ashamed about making that point with his mouth so noticeably full of food.

Well, I think you're maybe putting a little bit of a human thought process on that. I'm not sure he was ashamed.

But 98% similar.

That's true.

Yeah.

It's like when you get caught watching porn on your laptop.

It connects to the Bluetooth TV downstairs and then I got to explain why I have all this monkey's girlfriend porn. I should probably cut that. There's no way to not turn that against me.

There's no way to make that work. The rest of the article here goes on to describe how chimps and humans are being forced into closer and closer proximity due to deforestation by local farmers as well as vast plantations that are reshaping the landscape of chimpanzee territory. The result is that the death of the child was no isolated event. Police reports from the town of Muhororo, M-U-H-O-R-O-R-O.

Okay.

Anyway, it's nearby and they had two chimp on child attacks in 2017.

It was like a dingo ate my baby situation.

Well, I think, yeah, I think except it happened a lot more because that was, the dingo ate my baby thing was all bullshit, right? That was a woman who was just trying to...

I couldn't tell you. It's just a Seinfeld reference for me now.

No, I think it was real and like everybody had to apologize to her.

Oh, they did?

Oh, shit, really?

I think so. I think so, yeah.

Dingo ate my baby. Now, I'm curious. Yeah.

Because people thought it was fake forever, but then it was real. It was like...

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Confirmed or whatever.

In 1980, the girl was taken from her tent by a dingo. Her mother was convicted of murdering her daughter and sentenced to life in prison.

Wow.

In 1986, the girl's jacket was found in an area with many dingo layers. I can imagine the detective like out in the outback, and he like picks up the jacket and looks around, and all of a sudden, it's like the end of usual suspects. He just sees one dingo layer after another. He's like, my God.

It's also like a detective who was recently suspended and put on like dingo town. You know what I mean? Like, I got fucking reassigned to dingo town. Nothing ever happens in dingo town.

He never thought he'd solve this case.

No, she remained in prison.

No, no, no, in 2012, a coroner ruled that the girl died after being attacked and taken by a dingo. So, this is a little different than, or I guess it's the same as the dingo attacks because they're all real and they're all horrible. In 2017, in this neighboring village, a toddler named Maculet Racundo was seized in a cornfield while her mother worked the crops, she was seized by a chimp. The mother chased the chimps, but then backed off, terrified and ran to get help. A crowd of local people, soon joined by the police, tracked the chimps to a patch of forest where the little girl lay dead in a pool of blood and intestines. Her gut, oh here we go Mike, her gut torn open by chimp fingernails. Wow.

Nails, it was the nails.

It was the nails.

Wow.

Five weeks later, more chimps, the article notes may be the same group, but that's hard to know, took a one year old boy from another garden with his mother nearby and again retreated to a patch of forest. This kid survived. A posse of local villagers pursued the chimps until they dropped the boy who had a deep cut on his left leg, but was alive. And then in 2018, a five month old girl was snatched from a veranda while her mother worked in the kitchen. The mother heard her child's cries, raised a ruckus and charged the chimps who fled and the baby was found alive unconscious in a nearby bush. So some of these, it seems like they end well. And what's weird is that when I was researching it, there doesn't really seem to be much method to the madness. Other than chimps and humans being that close to each other just isn't good for either group. It doesn't seem like the chimps are particularly doing it out of a rage towards the kids or the people being nearby.

They're not leaving any, give us all the bananas, ransom letters.

No, they aren't.

Although this last one was in the house, which is interesting. The other ones were all, I think the article said that, it's a weird thing to say, but that the women combined childcare with hard labor, whoever the fuck that sentence was. And this is the first person who was just doing kind of indoor house labor and the baby was taken from a veranda, which is interesting. They're getting more bold. It's probably the same group. I would imagine. It's better, it's more interesting if it's like a baby snatching gang.

They do this to each other though. Chimps do kill other chimpanzee babies. So I had imagined that it's some kind of, you know, whatever the behavior is, is somehow just kind of crossing over onto human babies. The article finishes by noting that these attacks stretch back decades and seem to be almost inevitable as chimp territory shrinks. So the big debate in primatology though is whether chimp on chimp violence has increased or been spurred on by their proximity to humans. I found this from an article called Monkey See Monkey Kill published in the LA Times.

That sounds like propaganda a little bit. That sounds a little bigoted to me.

You're entering that article with an idea in your head.

Yes, whoever wrote that headline, I don't know if they had the best intentions here. But the article says, The killings are often swift and brutal. An overwhelming force of chimpanzees will pin their fellow primate to the ground as dozens of attackers commence to biting, punching, kicking and ripping at the victim's body. They'll tear off pieces of the body, often the genitalia, and sometimes they'll rip the throat out. It's really horrific the sort of damage they do, said Michael Wilson, a University of Minnesota evolutionary anthropologist who has studied chimps in the wild. Researchers have long debated the reasons as to why our closest living animal cousins would exercise deadly violence against their own kind, including many helpless infants. It might not seem like a very important question to us, but according to at least one source I found, the debate over this has resulted in screaming matches between various primatologists.

Oh my gosh.

So although it doesn't, I didn't see if they bit any of each other's fingers off, but they get worked up. They get worked up over whether or not this is-

I mean, what are the sides of the argument? Just one guy being like, they ripped the dicks off because it's their culture. Another guy being like, because they've learned violence.

No, so for a long time, the hypothesis was that human activity, including the fact that we destroy their habitats and give chimps food, was increasing aggression in chimpanzees. But it turns out, as far as we've been able to tell from newer research, that is way off base. A study published in Nature in 2014 suggests that murder rates in different chimp communities simply reflect the numerical makeup of the local population, which sounds like some real FBI crime statistic bullshit. But the international study was co-written by more than 30 scientists and gathers data from some 426 years of observation, combined years of observation, across 18 different chimp communities. A total of 152 killings were reported, including 58 that were directly observed by researchers, and the rest were counted based on detective work.

Detective work in Dingo Town!

They hired the Dingo detective to figure out what the fuck went down with these chimpanzees.

Wow.

Anyway, as the BBC puts it, the researchers' global compilation of chimp violent crime statistics allowed them to consider what conditions in a community produce a higher murder rate. Professor Joan Silk from Arizona State University said the results should finally put an end to the idea that violence in wild chimpanzees was a product of human interference.

So she entered this with the goal of clearing humans' name in the situation.

Yeah.

Because she's like, finally we can stop saying that we make them crazy.

We're, yeah, we're apparently not responsible for this.

And you know that report was made so they can tear down more chimp jungle to build a new condo or something.

Probably, yes. But all of that brings us to what we're really here to talk about, which is horribly disfiguring chimpanzee attacks perpetrated by captive chimps, the cute kind, the kind that we think of as our pets or our friends. Every time I see one of those viral videos of a chimp being reunited with someone who raised it and it runs and screams and jumps into their arms, I'm touched. But I remember how very wrong those relationships can go. And there are so many of these stories that it's hard to even know where to begin. But I found one story in Esquire with a headline that says it all. The headline, not quite as good as Monkey See Monkey Kill, but the headline is The Worst Story I Ever Heard. The whole piece is fantastic and well worth your time to check out. I've linked it in the show notes. The whole thing is very long, so we're not going to read the whole thing here. But it opens with this. St. James Davis is crying. It's a loud, whooping wail of a cry. He's sitting in the driveway of his childhood home, a sprawling L-shaped ranch house in West Covina, California, on a sun-drenched day last September. Standing next to him is his wife of nearly 40 years, LaDonna. So just to clarify, these are two people with last names for first names. St. James is one guy's name and his wife's name is LaDonna. So on the brink of tears herself, LaDonna grabs a cloth and gently cradles his cheek with her right hand. With her left, she carefully dabs at his mouth. St. James keeps his head still as she tends to him. He doesn't say a word as he calms down. He doesn't have to. LaDonna knows what he wants now that the sun is beating down on him. She grabs the beige bucket hanging around his neck and eases it onto his head. LaDonna tends to St. James because he can't tend to himself. St. James, 66, a former high school football star and one-time NASCAR driver, is severely disabled and disfigured. There's a two-inch hole in the heel of his swollen left foot and he's confined to a wheelchair. He has no nose, only a red, raw, exposed septum surrounded by narrow openings. At the top are three tiny magnets designed to hold in place a crude silicone prosthesis which is constantly falling off. His right eye is gone, replaced with glass. The skin on his face droops like candle wax because so many bones around his cheeks and eyes were broken. His mouth, which has been completely reconstructed, is stuck in a frown, which I feel like it would be anyway, reconstructed or not, given the rest of this. On his left hand, his index, middle and ring fingers are stumps. His right hand, much worse. He has a misshapen hunk of flesh for a thumb, which appears as if it were lumped onto his wrist with clay. His index and middle fingers are gone. His ring finger and pinky are immobile. It turns out he isn't crying because of his physical condition. It's because he's just received some very bad news about the chimpanzee that did this to him.

It got off. It's not going to death row.

So, very long story short, in the 1970s, St. James was a professional boat racer turned NASCAR driver.

This guy ruled.

This guy was a man about town. He was a bit of a kind of one of those guys that I feel like doesn't really exist anymore, but a very kind of 1970s guy. LaDonna, his wife, was his crew chief, one of the first women on the circuit to hold the role. And in 1967, St. James went on a trip to Tanzania and met Moe, a chimp whose mother was killed by poachers when he was only a day old, leaving him an orphan.

Yeah, and those are the type of monkeys that grow up to snatch your baby and throw it into the fucking woods. Yeah, maybe we are the problem. We're killing their parents. We're leaving them. Some turn into Batman. Other ones turn into the Joker. You can't help this.

St. James brought Moe home to his home in West Covina, and he and LaDonna immediately treated him more like a son than a pet. Moe would eat with them at the kitchen table and sleep in their bed. He was the best man at their wedding.

Excuse me?

Yeah. Which, cute. I mean, I'm sure he wore a tux and stuff.

I feel like that's a role for the ring bearer, where a monkey can come up and present the rings, but like, what's it do for the speeches and stuff? What's it do for the fucking, for the bachelor party?

True, true. It just gets out there and just starts screaming and throwing shit.

Just at a strip club, just being insane. Just throwing grapes at all the ladies.

Although, I'm sure there's best men at some weddings who have behaved worse.

That's true. 98% similar men.

Yeah. Yeah. Moe had his own bedroom, complete with a bed and a large closet for the plaid button-down shirts and blue jeans the Davises dressed him in, as well as Moe's dinner jackets and trousers for formal occasions.

Oh my God.

From the beginning, Moe's demeanor was gentle and well-behaved. He seemed to take pains to avoid scratching anyone with his flat, sharp fingernails. He was affectionate and loved to hug and kiss, throwing his hairy arms around St. James' neck often. When he wanted St. James to sit down next to him, he'd bound over and push on the backs of his knees, which feels like aggressive behavior that you'd want to flag.

Yeah. He keeps trying to accordion your legs.

Just slamming you into the ground. As Moe grew up, he became famous in West Covina and beyond. He attended ribbon-cutting ceremonies and fundraisers. He appeared in episodes of Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, BJ and the Bear.

Yeah, BJ and the Bear.

I don't remember BJ and the Bear.

Isn't that a show about a monkey and a truck driver or something?

It makes me think of The Shining. BJ and the Bear is the only thing that comes to mind for that. And Bowling for Dollars. He also had bit parts in movies, including the 1975 comedy Linda Lovelace for President.

Hell yeah.

Where I assume he must have gotten head from Linda Lovelace, but I didn't look that up. Anyway, in 1999, things started to go sour. So from 1967 to 1999, things apparently went pretty well, which has gotta be almost a record for anybody who's raising a chimp in their home, that things are okay for that long. Moe bit the finger off a visitor in 1999, and the Davises said he mistook the lady's red fingernail polish for his favorite treat, licorice.

But then what happened shortly after 1999? 9-11?

So, I don't know this shit, dude.

If you follow this, if you follow this, they were concerned when Moe never learned how to land in the flight simulator.

Stupid piece of shit.

The city took Moe away at this point and kicked off a long costly series of legal battles with the Davises who viewed Moe as their son. Keep in mind, Moe is 30 years old at this point and still living at home.

How long do they live?

That's a good question. I never actually-

In my mind, they live fucking six days, but now they might be like turtles of 200 years.

Chimps? No. Chimps, I mean, they have good lifespan. I wouldn't have said six days.

I mean, do they have good lifespan? You described 30 chimp babies that were killed in their community.

Okay, okay. In captivity, roughly 39 years for women and 32 years for males. So this guy was on the older side.

That's just like humans. We die first.

Yep. So he bit the finger off this woman. The city took him away. Moe's 30 years old. And the couple was extremely upset, obviously, despite the fact that I think it's a horrible idea to raise a chimpanzee from birth for 30 years.

And according to Planet of the Apes, when they take it away, because that happens in the first of the new Planet of the Apes movies, where it attacks someone in their town and gets taken away and taken to that sanctuary. And because it was never grew up with other monkeys, it had a horrible life there. It's like, that's probably what happened to this chimp too. He got taken to the monkeys. He's not used to other monkeys.

Yeah, actually, I mean, maybe a little bit of that was based on this story, because that's exactly where this is going.

Yeah, man.

By 2005, the Davises successfully got Mo placed at Animal Haven Ranch, where they made a two and a half hour drive to see him every week. So this next section, I'm reading straight from the article.

Did they have to talk to him through glass on a phone? Like it's prison? He puts his monkey hand up on the glass?

They let him out, I think. They would let him out to see his parents, which is where this all kind of goes wrong. On March 3, 2005, St. James and LaDonna drove to the sanctuary to celebrate Moe's 39th birthday. They left home early, around 7am, in a car filled with toys, presents, balloons, and a white frosted sheet cake with raspberry filling. After arriving at Animal Haven about 10am, St. James hopped out of the car and headed straight for Moe with a carton of chocolate milk in his hand. Moe was going mad, clapping his hands and hooting happily. LaDonna set the cake down on a picnic table, cut two slices and handed them to St. James. St. James handed one to Moe, oh, threw the bars of his cage and the animal's eyes went wide as he devoured his piece. LaDonna savored the moment. The family had been through so much over the last six years. Moe was finally at a place where he seemed content, where the couple could spend as much time with him as they wanted. If they couldn't ever live together again, this seemed like the next best thing. St. James and Moe were kissing each other. The moment was beautiful, perfect, almost.

Oh, my God.

Out of the corner of her eye...

It was fucking... What's it called when you're allowed to have people come and fuck you in prison?

Yeah.

Conjugal visits.

Conjugal visits with Moe.

Yeah.

He learned from that Linda Lovelace movie he was in. Out of the corner of her eye, LaDonna suddenly noticed a large form about 40 feet away. It was a chimpanzee, a young adult male, somehow out of his cage, and he was glaring at her. The chimp held her gaze for a moment and then charged. St. James rushed to his wife. The animal barreled into LaDonna's back, knocking her into St. James. She wrapped her arms around her husband's neck, but the chimpanzee locked his jaws around the thumb of her left hand. With a single ferocious jerk of his neck, he tore it off.

The whole hand?

Yeah, more hand damage.

I don't know if it was the whole hand or just her thumb, but either way, he did it with one bite.

It's interesting. It's like they go for the hands because it's like they know we use our hands.

Yeah.

It's like, fucking disarm them first with hand bites.

Yeah. All right. I guess my penis is safe, huh?

Disarm and then cause as much pain as possible, I think is sort of the order of operations there. St. James threw his hysterical wife under the picnic table.

She was a funny lady?

I think the hysteria in this case, Ed, is coming from the hand or thumb missing.

I don't know if it was just a descriptor. He would always be like, my hysterical wife, man. She has me in stitches when we're not stitching up her fucking monkey injuries.

It's an odd descriptor to use in this particular moment because if there were ever a moment to be hysterical, This is it. This is it. LaDonna was screaming commands, no, stop, sit in a desperate bid to stop the chimp. The remaining cake was on the table, still in its box, but the chimp didn't go for it. Instead, he went after St. James. As St. James confronted the chimp, the 6'2 former running back turned to find a second chimp.

Is there anything he hasn't done?

No, this guy.

What a life.

Well, the only thing he hasn't done apparently is successfully beat up a chimpanzee.

Okay.

Because-

You're giving away the story here. Continue.

Well, you know how the story started with his melting body or whatever.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right.

And also, to be fair, this is now a second chimp. If it remained just him versus one chimpanzee, he may have come out the victor. But the second chimpanzee, this one older and bigger, started bearing down on him as well. With both hands, St. James pushed the bigger animal and both chimps pounced. One of the animals grabbed him in a bear hug before chomping into the bone above his right eyebrow. He then stuck his finger in St. James' right eye, gouging it out. The same animal clamped his teeth onto St. James' nose, biting it off as the other chimp chewed away at St. James' fingers. In the melee, one of the chimps dug his claws in and ripped the skin off the right side of St. James' face, causing it to flop over and cover his left eye, temporarily blinding him.

Wait, I mean, I don't know, is there nobody who works at this sanctuary with like darts or something? Like, they're aware of the strength of monkeys here, like, they deal with them every day. This seems like an inside job. Why are there two fucking chimps out of their cages? All of a sudden, the like, this is fucking Epstein shit, the guards all of a sudden, the cameras are off.

Yeah, it does seem like they get an extremely long period of unattended time to do this to these poor people. Let's see, what injury was I on here?

You were on the eyeball covered by face flaps.

Oh yes, yes. The skin flopped over and covered his left eye temporarily blinding him. One of the primates sunk his teeth into St. James's skull. He then closed his jaws on St. James's mouth, ripping off his lips and most of his teeth. St. James tried to put one of his hands down the animal's throat, but the chimp just kept chewing on it and chewing on it and he couldn't get it out.

Oh no.

Fuck.

That was a good idea.

It is a good idea. That's gotta feel, having your arm just being gnawed on deep in a chimp's throat has gotta be almost worse than.

I mean, he's fucking quint at this point. You know what I mean? He's just kinda getting chomped up. These, and now have they left Laderna or Lekinsa in or whatever her name was?

Ladonna. She's still under the table being hysterical.

Okay, great. I mean, that's where you wanna be.

Yeah.

You definitely don't wanna be inside a chimp.

St. James fell to the ground, no longer able to defend himself, and for at least five minutes, the mauling continued as he lay helpless. One of the chimps gnawed on his buttocks and bit off his genitals. They ravaged his left foot, leaving it shredded. Blood poured from his body and Ladonna was screaming. It looked as if they were eating him alive. I wanna say, they were. It didn't just look like that. They, in fact, were definitely eating him alive.

Yeah.

Fuck. Despite the ferocity of the attack, when the paramedics arrived, St. James was still conscious. His face, oh God. I mean, being conscious through that is horrible.

What's the point of evolving to the point where you can't squeeze and punch things as hard as a monkey if it doesn't include being evolved enough that your brain would just like shut off at this point?

Shut off for this.

Right. You know what I mean? That's fucking crazy. And also, I don't, this is activating me, man. I'm all about monkey death sentences now. This is crazy.

And why couldn't we keep the strength? That doesn't make any sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, why can't we have iPhones and be strong like chimps? It doesn't.

It's really not fair. I mean, I guess maybe having the strength and the technology would make it.

Too powerful.

Yeah. We'd wipe out those remaining 300,000 chimps too quickly.

Right. Based on that short story or whatever, isn't like when you get something you really want, then you end up kind of getting fucked as like a monkey's paw situation? Yeah. Like to use the monkey's paw to like make a wish and then it ends up fucking you over.

Yeah.

So there's no part of our lives where the like us having no strength is a monkey's paw situation. So do you see what I'm saying? There's a Venn diagram of monkeys ruining our lives.

Yeah. There's no good way out of it for us. We just need to keep our distance from the chimps and we'll be fine.

The only good thing about that story is someone cut a fucking monkey's hand off.

No, no. Oh, the monkey's paw story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wonder if monkeys have a thing called like a human's penis that gives them bad luck. That drives the guy's penis.

Oh my God, dude.

They bring back to the community after one of these attacks.

Yeah. But you only get one weird wish. Like when it goes flaccid, that's how you do it, I guess. Like if you like bend the monkey's finger down in the wish story.

Right.

So you got to jerk off this little dick and then you get a wish.

Yeah. It starts all, now that wouldn't make sense. I was going to say it starts all desiccated and every time you make a wish, it gets harder. But I feel like you'll be losing power, not gaining powers.

Exactly.

I wonder if the monkey's paw was removed from Hangus, the Frenchman, the Frenchman monkey who died overseas.

At that time period, you got to use every part of a Frenchman.

Yeah. Despite the ferocity of the attack, when paramedics arrived, St. James was still conscious. His face and body, however, were mutilated beyond recognition. Where his mouth, lips and nose had been, there was only a bloody hole. Where his right eye had been, there was a pit. Where his fingers had been, he had only stumps or simply gaps. I had no idea a chimpanzee was capable of doing that to a human. Kern County Fire Captain Kurt Merrill, who was among the first on the scene, told the Los Angeles Times, It looked like a grizzly bear attack. Here we go. An investigation later found the chimps had escaped from their cage after one of the sanctuary's owners failed to lock two of its three doors.

Yeah, that's some abstained shit, man.

That's a problem.

That's an inside job.

I mean, at this point, there were a lot of people who didn't like St. James. Again, part of this very, very long article that I left out are all the legal battles and the back and forth about whether the monkey belonged in their house or not. So it's possible someone had it out for this guy because failing to lock two of the three doors is a pretty big oversight.

And you know they're the only visitors to this place ever. So they have to open it up for them, let them in. They gotta stop beating their monkey up for five minutes when they're there. And so they probably hated them.

Maybe this is the place that became mostly monkeys after all this went down.

When the fire chief was like, you know, I can also set fires. I don't just put them out. You want me to burn this fucking place down to the ground? And then the guy is like, if you're burning the monkeys anyways, I'll take them and I'll have Chris feed a marshmallow to it.

I wasn't sure how I was going to come away from this episode being like, oh, it's not that common. It's actually fairly rare that a chimp will attack you. But I think after this, I'm going to be more scared of chimps.

Yeah, I mean, it does seem like any anytime a chimp is in close contact to the human being, it will eventually end like this. It might take 30 years. Although I guess technically, in this case, Mo wasn't the one who did the violence. It was these two other chimps. Because in this investigation, animal behaviorists suggested the chimps' aggression could have been caused by a number of factors, including jealousy over the attention, Davis's lavish on Mo, or an innate desire to defend their territory, or abuse they may have suffered at the hands of humans in the past.

So do you think this was just the worst? I mean, obviously, it was the worst for St. James.

Yes.

But do you think the second worst was like, Mo was helpless to help St. James? He was stuck behind a cage.

Yeah.

He had to just like watch people beat up his best friend.

Yeah, that's it is actually sad.

That's actually very sad.

It is. I don't know.

Obviously, they didn't interview Mo. Yeah, he's not going to give you a good quote.

Yeah, well, and they can't because part of what makes this whole thing even sadder. Again, the story is called The Worst Story I've Ever Heard. And so part of what makes the whole thing sadder is that by 2007, the Davises were back to visiting Mo once a week. So like, what was that, like seven years after this happened, or maybe a little bit, maybe a little bit less. They were back to visiting Mo once a week and then Mo disappeared.

Disappeared?

Disappeared. He broke six steel welds off his cage, allowing him to open a sliding door and escape. A massive chimp hunt was launched, but Mo was never found.

Oh my god. So that is the craziest ending to this fucking story.

Oh.

Because he's like 46 now. Like I thought he was just going to die.

No, he outlived most chimps and then either broke these hinges off of his cage, or again, Ed, like you've been saying, there may have been conspiracy at play here. DB.

Cooper.

Breaking six steel wells off your cage at 46 years of monkey age or whatever.

True. Using a level of strength that you did not present on the day when your best friend's getting killed.

Yeah.

Like if you had the ability to rip off steel wells, he would have done it to protect his friend.

On that day. Yeah.

Wow. And I do think that the James Franco fucking first new ape movie is definitely inspired by a bunch of this.

Yeah. Wow.

Well, this episode is brought to you by the Second Amendment.

We all need to get out there and protect ourselves.

Make sure you carry everybody.

Moe's still on the loose. Moe's out there. Well, Moe's dead by now.

No, I don't know. Moe, that's the thing is Moe seems like the kind of guy who would, who would, based on everything we've heard about him, he might like put a bunch of coconuts in a diaper and like leave a fake body somewhere. We think Moe's dead.

Yeah. He's a step ahead.

Do you think, because this was 2007?

2007 is when Moe disappeared.

Yeah, Moe disappeared. 2009 is the Connecticut Chimp Attack. So it's like every year we got like a crazy chimp attack or a crazy chimp escape.

Yeah.

Right around the financial crisis.

Oh my God, right?

Yeah.

Do you think he caused the financial crisis?

Either that or they just don't like Obama.

Oh my God.

Well, this is a tough episode.

They're Republican chimps. They're really upset.

Yeah.

They're birthers.

What?

He started the movement. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of national news, Harambe. What was Harambe? And I feel like it should have come up on the heels of your Second Amendment joke, but I also feel like people who are into Harambe are not going to be excited about us talking about killing chimps.

Harambe was a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo who, like, a kid fell in the enclosure and then Harambe, like, took the baby and kind of dragged it and they, like, had to kill Harambe because-

They lit him up.

Yeah.

Was, I think he was a boy gorilla, right?

Yeah. But remember, like, there was, like, justice for Harambe, like, Harambe-

Yeah.

People got mad about the Harambe murder. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's why I felt like the obvious thing to bring up during our Second Amendment discussion, but it also feels like it's a hot topic, so I don't want to.

Yeah, I guess Harambe was, like, innocent.

He was, I guess.

But if you see the video, that gorilla, like, drags the kid, like, really fast. I mean, that's, yeah, monkeys are strong, I guess, is the point I'm trying to make.

And I will say, if there's one thing that, that is a constant for all these stories so far, is that monkeys get to destroy human beings with impunity. Like, nobody steps in. It's like, please, please, please, everyone, the monkeys are doing their thing.

Right.

Except for Harambe. And the one time they step in, it was a national disaster for people.

Yeah, there's no monkeys who advocate for us. There's no liberal monkeys who are like, justice for that guy.

No, no. I mean, I think a lot of times with these monkey attacks, there's only so much, it almost reminds me of when the killer whales, like when Shamu or whatever would attack somebody. There was not much jumping in. Anyone could do that either. It was like, you got to hope they let go, unless you have a very, very big gun.

Yeah, but I feel like you bazookaed shampoo that day. Shampoo, whatever, I don't know the name. Shamu gets bazookaed. I feel like we'd have the same outpouring of like, kids in college campuses wearing the Nuke The Whales t-shirt from Simpsons, but it's got the like, no smoking red X through it.

I think some of the Harambe thing was really more of like, a meme than people really being super upset.

Oh, in that case, maybe I'll include the Harambe discussion.

But this story, this is where the chimpanzee tragedy does sort of leave the story, but the end of this story is actually crazy and worth touching on, because it makes me wonder why this hasn't become a true crime miniseries or something on Peacock or some shit, because according to an NBC News article, the Davises were awarded $4 million in a 2009 settlement.

Right when no one had money to give them.

Yeah, yeah. Over the next several years, daily life got harder for them despite the money. St. James required constant attention, and LaDonna was in her early 70s and slowing down. Longtime neighbors fell out of touch and in some cases died, leaving the couple more isolated than vulnerable. Some men brought in to help out at their one and a half acre property would keep coming around, and the Davises' possessions sometimes went missing.

Wow, now, they get elder abuse in the end?

Elder abuse from the craziest angle possible. The Davises met a man who was not related, it sounds like, to these men who were stealing things. They met a man who shared their love of cars, an immigrant from Myanmar named Min Zaw Ma, and Min Zaw Ma, Who looked suspiciously like Mo in a trench coat and hat. He coerced the aging LaDonna to sign over a living will to himself that included the Davises' properties and control of their bank accounts. By the time authorities were alerted and stepped in, the house had been taken over by members of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, who had forced Min Zaw Ma out and were neglecting LaDonna, basically just letting her rot in her room while they partied and did whatever business the Mongols Motorcycle Club had to get up to.

This is a more interesting version of The Bike Riders if you watch that movie this year.

Yes. That movie, I like Jeff Nichols, but that movie really didn't do it for me.

I didn't hate it, but now I realize it just needed a monkey.

Most movies do. And that's basically where the story of this family ends. The motorcycle gang eventually was evicted and a legal battle began and Mo was never found. So yeah, the worst story I've ever heard.

Yeah, us too. Thanks for subjecting that to Mike and Mike to that, I guess. Sorry, bud.

But yeah, that's kind of, I think, where we can leave chimp attacks. And I think, Mike, so when we end these episodes, we talk about where this fear sits on the fear tier, which is zero to ten. The top of the fear tier is getting a hot bucket of piss and shit dumped on your head, which is the thing that happened in Los Angeles that Ed is terrified is going to happen to him someday. So where would you place your fear of chimps on that scale?

Like how much I think it's going to happen or like how scared I am of it?

Let's say how realistic or? Well, it's probably unlikely that it's going to happen, but in terms of I think how scary you find it if it were to happen and a list of terrible things that could happen to you.

It just seems like it's hard to imagine anything like worse or less dignified.

Less dignified is a good way to look at it.

Yeah.

There's no way to look cool when getting all your fingers bitten off.

Yeah, like nobody feels bad for you if you get ripped apart by a chimp. You know, there's like so much other horrible stuff that happens in the world. They're going to go, what were you doing in your chimp?

Yeah, it always feels like you deserved it on some level. You did something wrong.

Yeah, they're going to victim blame you.

Yeah, getting attacked by a shark or something, you know, outside of being in the water. Whose fault, you know, is it really? But a chimp, right? They assume you were harassing it. Ed, where would you put it on on the fear tier?

Yeah, likelihood pretty low, because I don't think I've ever been anywhere with a chimp to this day. And I don't think I've ever been to a chimp exhibit at a zoo or seen them in the wild and not working with the Jane Goodall Association or whatever.

Wait, you've never even seen a chimp at the zoo?

No, I went to like the fucking Bronx Zoo when I was a kid, and I don't remember what enclosures I did or didn't see.

Well, apparently the Bronx Zoo had the strongest chimpanzee of all time.

Yeah, but not by the time I got there.

I don't know if I've ever seen one. I've seen gorillas and stuff at the zoo, but I don't think I've seen a chimpanzee in person.

Yeah, so it's not as common as you think.

Yeah.

Ed, we got to go down. I think the San Diego Zoo has chimps. We can go down there.

I don't think we have to now. They sound terrifying. So I guess I would put it pretty high, though, because every one of those stories was honestly sounded worse than when we did Being Eatin Alive. Like, those sounded worse than bear attacks. They sounded... Because the bear, it's just like it pushes you to the ground and starts eating up your belly and stuff.

Yeah.

I feel like the...

Yeah, it's not personal.

Yeah, it doesn't feel like personal. It's not like the bear with five fingers, like a human-ass hand, takes your hand and like starts eating one finger at a time as like... Yeah, you're right. Like personal is a good word for it. It just, it feels too personal. It's like, what did I do to you?

Yeah.

Your chimp girlfriend was looking at me. And so I would say like an eight. It's pretty high on the fear tier for me in terms of like worst way to be eaten alive.

Yeah. Yeah. It is.

In the cannibal episode we did, they were not doing this shit.

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, it's the only, it's one of the only animals that can look you in the eye while it eats your fingers and rips your dick off. And you get something from that.

And you described a bunch of chimp on chimp crime that was observed. You said that people watched, you know, and they took into account, I wrote in my journal, hey, I saw three dick rips this week or whatever.

Yeah.

And so it's like, it's just crazy that you have a preview to your own demise, but yet you still spend time with them. You're like, oh no, I literally saw like a bunch of ripped dicks off this week.

Yeah. Well, it's because-

And then I decided to put a diaper and move it into my house.

Well, I think the people who are studying it out in the wild, they probably become desensitized to it.

Oh, shit, yeah.

They see so many chimp dicks getting ripped off that, you know, they don't think about it after a while.

It's all I would think about. It's all I'm thinking about now.

Yeah. I guess, and I would put it a little lower than you. I'll average out the how horrible it would be to the likelihood of it and put it in a solid five. I'm not super scared of it, but were I to ever see a chimp out of its cage advancing on me, it would be one of the scariest things I could imagine seeing. I mean, did you guys see Nope?

Yeah.

The sequence in Nope with the chimp on the set is one of the scariest parts of that movie.

Mike, did you see Nope?

The beginning of it on a plane. Yeah, sure.

Okay. Yeah, no, it's got some monkey stuff in that movie, for sure. And is that based on a true story or no?

I think it's just based-

Or like some element.

I think just sort of- The actual chimp attack on the set of the sitcom, I don't think is a true story. I think it's just sort of- The woman whose face is covered in Nope is based on what the woman who was on Oprah looked like, who I think might have been the lady from Connecticut who lost her face.

Yeah, I mean, that's- Yeah, I think the woman from Connecticut, her face was just fully pulled off.

Yeah, and they can't-

It was face-off.

Take the face off.

Yeah.

There's not much they can do at that point. Once your face is inside the monkey's mouth-

They gotta make you a new face.

Yeah.

We're just not there. We're just not there as a society with the technology-

No.

To give you a great new face.

All right. Well, that's where we'll leave it for this week. If you lose your face to a chimpanzee, you're not getting it back. Mike, thank you so much for joining us and talking about all this chimp violence with us. Is there anything else you want to plug at the end of the episode here?

Just my new show, Recine Time, and I got a special on YouTube called OmNormal that you can check out. I got some road dates coming up. I got like Chicago, Wisconsin, Fargo, North Dakota, and New England. I've been to Boston and Portland, Maine. So you can see those dates at micracinecomedy.com.

Hell yeah.

Cool. And all that will be in the episode description as well. Well, you guys can totally click on all that and find all this stuff.

Awesome. All right. Well, until next time, I'm Chris Cullari.

I'm Ed Voccola. That was Microcine.

That was Microcine. This has been Scared All The Time, and we will talk to you guys in two weeks.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Vifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

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