CHIMPS in Hollywood

Chimpanzees have been acting in Hollywood for decades.

Perhaps the best-known chimp of all is Cheeta, Tarzan's sidekick in the popular movie series starring Johnny Weismuller, which ran in the 1930s.

At 75, Cheeta, long-retired from show business, is the world's oldest documented living chimp. Today he lives at the Cheeta Primate Sanctuary, in California.

A chimp performs with his trainer.

Chimps in Entertainment: Short Careers

While this primate actor had a good life and retirement, he is lucky. For many chimps in show business, their lives are bleak.

Show business chimps, the kind you see smirking in commercials, or acting in movies, are actually babies taken from their mothers. The working life of a chimp is short. Their cuteness and affability limited to childhood. By the time they are seven or eight, the chimp can weigh up to 100 kilos and have the strength of three humans.

Chimps can live long lives after they lose their usefulness as actors. After that it becomes a struggle to find a place for them to live. Most accredited zoos find it very difficult to accept retired entertainment chimps, citing the lack of primate socialization of those chimps.

Once their career in show business is over many chimps are left to live out their lives in horrible conditions.

A number of chimps wind up at roadside zoos throughout the United States, where they live in often substandard and unhealthy environments. (Read a story about the Nebraska Zoo)

Some retired entertainment chimpanzees, however, are lucky enough to wind up at well-maintained sanctuaries in the United States and Canada, where they are allowed to live out their lives in comfortable surroundings.

Training Controversy

Training techniques used by chimps have come under intense scrutiny by some animal welfare agencies.

A report published by the Chimpanzee Collaboratory, a Washington-based partnership of scientists, attorneys and primate experts, maintains there is no really humane way to train apes to perform.

Primatologist Sarah Baeckler went undercover at Yost training facility.

The report, whose contributors include Jane Goodall, accuse some trainers of employing electric devices to shock chimps, of beating them with fists and hitting them with mop handles. (read the report here)

Perhaps the most notorious case involving an animal trainer accused of abusing chimps is that of Sid Yost. In 2002, Sarah Baeckler, a young primatologist, went undercover as a volunteer at Yost's training facility in California.

Undercover Investigation at Training Facility

Baeckler spent 14 months there observing, what she would later claim was violent, abusive behaviour.

A photo of an 'ugly stick' used at Yost's facility.

"They punch them they kick them," Baeckler told fifth estate reporter Bob McKeown. "They use weapons such as a sawed-off broom handle that they called the ugly stick… they used them to threaten the chimps but also to strike them. They throw rocks and locks and other hard things at these, these are baby chimpanzees they're doing."

After Baeckler went public, the Animal Legal Defense Fund sued Yost over his training methods.

Late last year, Yost, as part of the settlement to the lawsuit, gave up his chimps. Two of the chimps, Sable and Cody, wound at the Save the Chimps sanctuary in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Yost's third chimp, Angel, wound up at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida.

Hollywood animal trainer Steve Martin.

Trainers say they have been given a bad rap by animal activists, and insist they mostly use positive enforcement to get the animals to perform. Any force that is used is minimal.

"Cause it's just like with children," Steve Martin, Hollywood's main supplier of animal actors recently told Bob McKeown. "Some people believe in never having any discipline and then some parents might think a swift smack on the butt might do this kid some good. So I mean who's to say who's right?"

Chimp Trainer: Chimps may not be part of future movies

Martin says he does not believe chimps will be a part of the movie making landscape much longer, and may be a thing of the past in a decade.

Last year Martin's lawyer sent a letter to various primate sanctuaries offering to sell his chimps or, says the letter, or he would begin breeding them to "exploit the new business opportunities." (read the letter)

"Well if somebody wants to pay me enough money and buy me out, fine," Martin told Bob McKeown. "How about you, wouldn't you go for the same thing? When you know the inevitability of working chimps is very short?"

Visit Steve Martin's site.