Primate Rescue Center

Many exotic pet owners, like Terry Thompson in Zanesville, Ohio, are hobbyists, which means they don't often have the experience needed to tend to the needs of the animals.

The slaughter of over 50 renegade animals let loose from a backyard zoo in Zanesville, Ohio, Wednesday is shedding light on the people who actively pursue owning lions, bears, tigers, baboons and other exotic pets and why they risk their lives to tend to animals many consider dangerous and unfit for private habitation.

Terry Thompson, the man who released 56 animals from captivity before taking his own life, was already well known to national animal welfare advocates, not just because of the unusual number and variety of animals he collected, but because of the multiple complaints of animal mistreatment he incurred, including a 2005 conviction of animal cruelty. Mr. Thompson also served a one-year federal prison term for illegal gun possession.

His interest in curating his own private zoo on his 73-acre farm fits the description of many people who live with or near exotic animals, says Adam Roberts, executive vice president of Born Free USA, a national animal advocacy organization in Sacramento, Calif.

Read more at CSmonitor.com

ZANESVILLE, Ohio - Dozens of animals escaped Tuesday from a wild-animal preserve that houses bears, big cats and other beasts, and the owner later was found dead there, said police, who shot several of the animals and urged nearby residents to stay indoors.

As a result of the breakout, several schools near the preserve have canceled classes Wednesday, reports CBS 10-TV.

The fences had been left unsecured at the Muskingum County Animal Farm in Zanesville, in east-central Ohio, and the animals' cages were open, police said. They wouldn't say what animals escaped but said the preserve had lions, tigers, cheetahs, wolves, giraffes, camels and bears. They said bears and wolves were among 25 escaped animals that had been shot and killed and there were multiple sightings of exotic animals along a nearby highway.

"These are wild animals that you would see on TV in Africa," Sheriff Matt Lutz warned at a press conference.

Neighbor Danielle White, whose father's property abuts the animal preserve, said she didn't see loose animals this time but did in 2006, when a lion escaped.

"It's always been a fear of mine knowing (the preserve's owner) had all those animals," she said. "I have kids. I've heard a male lion roar all night."

Lutz called the escaped animals "mature, very big, aggressive" but said a caretaker told authorities the preserve's 48 animals had been fed on Monday. He said police were patrolling the 40-acre farm and the surrounding areas in cars, not on foot, and were concerned about big cats and bears hiding in the dark and in trees.

"This is a bad situation," Lutz said. "It's been a situation for a long time."

Lutz said his office started getting phone calls at about 5:30 p.m. that wild animals were loose just west of Zanesville on a road that runs under Interstate 70.

He said four deputies with assault rifles in a pickup truck went to the animal farm, where they found the owner, Terry Thompson, dead and all the animal cage doors open. He wouldn't say how Thompson died but said several aggressive animals were near his body when deputies arrived and had to be shot.

Thompson, who lived on the property, had orangutans and chimps in his home, but those were still in their cages, Lutz said.

The deputies, who saw many other animals standing outside their cages and others that had escaped past the fencing surrounding the property, began shooting them on sight. They said there had been no reports of injuries among the public.

Staffers from the Columbus Zoo went to the scene, hoping to tranquilize and capture the animals. The sheriff said caretakers might put food in the animals' open cages to try to lure them back.

Lutz said people should stay indoors and he might ask for local schools to close Wednesday. At least four school districts in the area canceled classes.

Lutz said his main concern was protecting the public in the rural area, where homes sit on large lots of sometimes 10 acres.

"Any kind of cat species or bear species is what we are concerned about," Lutz said. "We don't know how much of a head start these animals have on us."

A spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which usually handles native wildlife, such as deer, said state Division of Wildlife officers were helping the sheriff's office cope with the exotic animals in Zanesville, a city of about 25,000 residents.

"This is, I would say, unique," spokeswoman Laura Jones said.

White, the preserve's neighbor, said Thompson had been in legal trouble, and police said he had gotten out of jail recently.

At a nearby Moose Lodge, Bill Weiser remembered Thompson as an interesting character who flew planes, raced boats and owned a custom motorcycle shop that also sold guns.

"He was pretty unique," Weiser said. "He had a different slant on things. I never knew him to hurt anybody, and he took good care of the animals."

Ohio has some of the nation's weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them.

In the summer of 2010, an animal caretaker was killed by a bear at a property in Cleveland. The caretaker had opened the bear's cage at exotic-animal keeper Sam Mazzola's property for a routine feeding.

Though animal-welfare activists had wanted Mazzola charged with reckless homicide, the caretaker's death was ruled a workplace accident. The bear was later destroyed.

This summer, Mazzola was found dead on a water bed, wearing a mask and with his arms and legs restrained, at his home in Columbia Township, about 15 miles southwest of Cleveland.

It was unclear how many animals remained on the property when he died, but he had said in a bankruptcy filing in May 2010 that he owned four tigers, a lion, eight bears and 12 wolves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had revoked his license to exhibit animals after animal-welfare activists campaigned for him to stop letting people wrestle with another one of his bears.

Mazzola had permits for nine bears for 2010, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources said. The state requires permits for bears but doesn't regulate the ownership of nonnative animals, such as lions and tigers.

(CBS/AP)
Updated 1:45 a.m. ET

The testing began shortly after Bobby’s first birthday. By the time he was 19 he had been anesthetized more than 250 times and undergone innumerable biopsies in the name of science. Much of the time he lived alone in a cramped, barren cage. Bobby grew depressed and emaciated and began biting his own arm, leaving permanent scars.

Bobby is a chimpanzee. Born in captivity to parents who were also lab chimps, he grew up at the Coulston Foundation, a biomedical research facility in Alamogordo, N.M., that was cited for repeated violations of the Animal Welfare Act before it was shuttered in 2002. He is one of the lucky ones. Today he lives in a sanctuary called Save the Chimps in Fort Pierce, Fla., where he can socialize and roam freely. Last year the National Institutes of Health announced plans to put some 180 ex-Coulston chimps currently housed at the Alamogordo Primate Facility back in service, to rejoin the roughly 800 other chimps that serve as subjects for studies of human diseases, therapies and vaccines in the U.S., which is the only country apart from Gabon to maintain chimps for this purpose.

Read more at ScientificAmerican.com

April Truitt, who runs the Primate Rescue Center in Jessamine County, is sending that message to movie director Cameron Crowe in a plea not to use monkeys or apes in any more films.

Truitt and others who operate similar sanctuaries for abandoned or neglected animals say they're concerned that the use of a Capuchin monkey in Crowe's new movie, We Bought a Zoo, will cause the public to buy the creatures as pets, only to cast them off when they become too difficult to tend.

"Monkeys and apes are adorable as babies, but the novelty soon wears off and they grow into strong adults who are strong-willed, naturally curious and destructive, and capable of causing some pretty severe injuries," members of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance wrote to Crowe in a letter this week.

Read more at the Lexington Herald-Leader

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that it will initiate a status review to determine whether reclassifying all captive chimpanzees from threatened to endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is warranted.

Currently, wild chimpanzees are listed as endangered, and captive chimpanzees are listed as threatened. Captive chimpanzees within the United States are covered by a special rule allowing activities otherwise prohibited by the ESA.

Read more at Fish & Wildlife Service

It was a wedding that thousands waited eagerly for since the engagement was announced. Invitations were sent, the details were meticulously labored over, and finally, to the almost-hysteric joy of the crowds, the big day arrived.

In the small village of Talwas, Rajasthan, Raju, a well-known cigarette smoking monkey, and his bride Chinki were married. But the carefully made preparations were thrown into havoc by government officials who cracked down on the animal nuptials, because monkeys are technically government property. So marrying a monkey, even to another monkey, is illegal.

Read more at HuffingtonPost.com

A group of lawmakers is seeking to put the kibosh on transporting primates in the exotic pet trade.

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), David Vitter (R-La.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) are standing up for our genetically similar, hairy friends by introducing the Captive Primate Safety Act. The measure would make it illegal to move monkeys, apes and other non-human primates across state lines in order to sell them.

Read more at TheHill.com

Yerkes National Primate Research Center keeps a total of about 3,400 primates at a 25-acre campus in Atlanta and the 117-acre field station in Lawrenceville. The field station, which opened in 1966, is home to 1,899 rhesus macaques and 2,220 animals overall.

After a 2-year-old research monkey was reported missing from the Lawrenceville facility on June 15, an increasingly vocal group of local residents and animal-rights activists have called for the facility to be shuttered and forced to relocate.

Read more at AtlantaJournalConstitution.com

The film is based on a book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess. The documentary was directed by James Marsh, a fine filmmaker whose earlier movie¸ Man on a Wire, proved that documentaries could be suspenseful, even when you go in knowing the outcome.

Nim’s story gets the full professional treatment in a movie that looks very good and moves the emotions too. There are some drawbacks as well. Nobody ever mentions that Nim’s name is a play onNoam Chompsky. When I first learned of the project, back in the 70s, I laughed mightily at the name, although now that I’ve seen the movie I’m a bit ashamed of myself. The name is a joke because Terrace never took Nim’s individuality seriously.

Read more at ScientificAmerican.com

Project Nim, a documentary from James Marsh, director of the Academy Award-winning Man on Wire, isn't a heartwarming comedy about a group of furry beasts who use their newfound power of language to help their caretaker find love with Rosario Dawson. It's a gripping, unsentimental, at times unbearably sad real-life drama about an animal torn from his own world and stranded in the human one.

I could wish Project Nim were a different movie—longer and more information-dense, with fewer poorly signposted re-enactments and self-conscious directorial flourishes. But I'll be forever grateful to this movie for introducing me to Nim's story, a tale so powerful and suggestive that it functions as a myth about the ever-mysterious relationship between human beings and animals. Are we more like them than we can ever know, or more different?

Read more at Slate.com