Chimpanzee Attacks on Humans: Survivors' Accounts of Injuries from Captive and Wild Incidents

In February 2009, Charla Nash, then 50, went to visit her friend Sandra Herold in Stamford, Connecticut. Herold had raised a pet chimpanzee named Travis for most of his life. He weighed more than 200 pounds, and he attacked Nash. He tore off her hands and then went after her lips, eyelids, eyes and nose. By the time emergency responders arrived, very little of her face remained, and doctors later had to reattach her jaw. Herold stabbed the animal with a kitchen knife in an attempt to save her friend. When help came, Travis approached a police car and tried to open the door, and officers shot him dead. Nash has since had numerous reconstructive surgeries using pioneering procedures.

It is one of several cases collected in a tabloid roundup of chimpanzee attacks. The piece opens with the claim that chimps share almost 99 per cent of our DNA but are estimated to be around four times as strong as a human. It appears alongside a report that scientists have, for the first time, witnessed wild chimps killing and eating gorillas, which researchers fear may be linked to climate change and shrinking food supplies.

Another case involves St James Davis and his wife LaDonna of California. He brought a chimp named Moe home from a trip to South Africa in 1967, planning to keep him a few years. Moe stayed for nearly three decades. After he bit a police officer in 1998 and a woman the next year, authorities removed him, and after a long custody fight he ended up at the Animal Haven Ranch. On March 3, 2005, the couple visited to celebrate his 39th birthday. Two young chimps broke out of their cage and attacked them. LaDonna lost a thumb. Davis, then 62, had his nose bitten off, fingers chewed off and right eye gouged out, and was mauled for at least five more minutes on the ground. One chimp bit off his genitals, and his left foot was ravaged. The owner's son-in-law, drawn by the screams, shot both animals dead. Davis spent six months in hospital.

Most of the cases involve captive animals, but not all. In 2014, six-year-old Dunia Sibomana was playing near a nature reserve in Congo with his cousin and his four-year-old brother when wild chimps attacked. The two younger children were killed. Dunia survived with his lips torn off, his cheek ripped apart and muscle damage that made swallowing and communicating hard. In 2016 he was taken to New York for rare reconstructive surgery at a Long Island hospital.

In 2012, Andrew Oberle, then an aspiring primate researcher from the University of Texas, was in South Africa studying chimpanzee tool use for his master's. While leading a tour at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden near Johannesburg, he stepped into a restricted zone, and two chimps hauled him under an electric fence. They dragged him 30 metres and mauled him from head to toe. He lost part of his scalp, both ears, his nose, most of his fingers and part of his feet, suffered collapsed lungs, and had chunks torn from his wrists, back and legs. He was placed in an induced coma and had six hours of surgery immediately. He now directs development at the Oberle Institute, a trauma care program at Saint Louis University.

The most recent case came last month in Oregon. Buck, a 200-pound chimp that had lived on the Brogoitti family ranch for 17 years, mauled the owner Tamara Brogoitti's 50-year-old daughter, biting her legs, arms and torso. The two women sheltered in a basement bedroom, and when police arrived Buck was roaming the fence around the house. Brogoitti gave officers permission to shoot him. In audio of her call obtained by KHQ-TV, she says her daughter needs an ambulance that cannot reach her, that she is locked in the basement and cannot get to her own gun, and that she has never seen anything like it.

The wild cases center on Uganda, where habitat loss has fueled conflict between people and chimps. Chimps have raided crops, threatened livelihoods and attacked people. National Geographic highlighted the problem in 2019, including a 2014 attack in which a chimp took a two-year-old boy from his mother, broke his arm, attacked his head, tore open his abdomen and removed his kidneys. He died on the way to hospital. Since then, at least three more children have died and six more have been injured or narrowly escaped. No one knows for certain why the chimps target children; curiosity and predation have both been suggested. A major factor is that many chimps in western Uganda have lost their natural habitat to farming.