Travis The Chimp And Understanding Humanity

A different way to look at what's happening with mass casualty violence.

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Travis the Chimp is a sociocultural crime case from 2009 in Stamford, CT, best summarized herein.

Essentially, Travis was a chimp who was almost fully raised around humans and as part of a human family and human interaction. He was named for Travis Tritt (ha), and rode around in his owner’s tow truck in a baseball shirt. He apparently even drove the tow truck sometimes. He liked ice cream and Tickle Me Elmo. After the father and son of the family died (cancer and a car accident, I believe), he slept with the mother at night and she pampered him as a human son.

Eventually, he mauled her friend Charla (photo above) and set off waves of sweeping legislation about keeping primates as pets. Travis himself was killed by Stamford police.

Adam Lanza was the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary, where 20 children and six adults were killed in 2012. Sandy Hook was probably the worst mass shooting you can recall in your brain. It didn’t have the most victims, but the victims were young children, some of whom didn’t even understand “death.” And then we did the traditional American thing where we divided into camps and called it a “false flag” and even 10–11 years later, there are still lawsuits and discussions and “takes” on what happened a few weeks before Christmas in some generally-affluent Connecticut town.

Well, a year or so before that massacre, Adam Lanza had actually called into a radio show to discuss Travis the Chimp, the full audio of which is contained within this video:

Here’s the transcript, in which Lanza is identified as “Greg.”

The call is a little bit disjointed, but a few parts are interesting in light of what Lanza would eventually become known for: