everybody's got a monkey

And then the chimpanzee ripped off her ear.
There had been a string of mishaps with this chimp—the grabbing of the drive-thru Taco Belle employee, the biting and sacking of the photographer with the Hasselblad—but the worst was when my friend got her ear ripped off. I mean really, all but a little flap of skin in the front. I watched, horrified, thinking that the evil monkey had just ripped out an earring, as a trickle of blood coursed down her white eyelet blouse. Then I realized it was too much blood. Ice, the hospital, stitches, shots. No apology, ever, from the chimpanzee owner, a major animal rights type.
"Sammy [the chimp's name] is an adolescent," he told me."He is struggling for primacy over females."
"Doesn't that mean he will be challenging you, as the alpha male?" I asked.
"Oh, no. I am his father. He would never harm me."
Sometime after the ear incident, I get a call from my ear-impaired friend's husband. "Are you sitting down?" he asks.
"Yes," I say. "What's going on?"
"That chimp, Sammy, he bit off his owner's little finger."
I think about that. The owner is a guitar player who needs all his fingers. "I told him Sammy would turn on him," I say.
"He offered his son $20,000 for the last joint of his finger," my friend tells me. "But the son's a guitar player, too. He turned him down."
So do you agree with Daphne Merkin (NYT Sunday) that people are more important than animals, or do you think that all kitties and mice are precious creatures?
Personally, along with Daphne Merkin (Sunday NYT) I'd rather innoculate a million chimps (especially Sammy) with HIV virus than one human.
Reason I can't stop smoking today: Nature red in tooth and claw