A Cage of One’s Own? On Interspecies Captive-ation
This essay on interspecies captivation, human-primate fixations, and ethical relations is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.
In August of 2024, documentarian Eric Goode pivoted from the licit sleaziness of Tiger King to focus on the wild chimpanzee pet trade with his newest series, Chimp Crazy. Much of the series focuses on the eccentricities of its lead—the self-described “Dolly Parton of chimps”—Tonia Haddix. Viewers, like myself, first meet Haddix while she works as a volunteer caretaker at the Missouri Primate Foundation. However, as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) attempts to revoke the licensing for the Missouri Primate Foundation, the facility and its chimpanzees are signed over to Haddix, who is determined to keep possession of the primates.
In particular, Goode focuses on Tonia’s love for Tonka, an ex-Hollywood chimp who is being relocated to a chimpanzee sanctuary after PETA’s legal wins. As her life descends into fugitivity, Tonia fakes Tonka’s death, lies at judicial hearings, and does whatever she can to continue caring for a chimp that she loves. In her opening monologue, she stares at the camera and proclaims, “I would give my life for him… and that’s exactly what I did to be honest.”
As a cultural anthropologist who studies human-lemur relations, I was immediately drawn to Haddix while watching Chimp Crazy. While lemurs and chimpanzees are clearly different, I’ve found that both species move people to live their lives in certain ways. Fieldwork at primatological and conservation sites in the US and Madagascar has introduced me to a whole cast of lemur lovers, each with varying ways of caring for lemur welfare and conservation. From research expeditions into Malagasy rainforests to observing lemurs using touch screens in captivity, I’ve also studied how primatologists and conservationists conceptualize ethical interspecies relations. None of my interlocutors, however, had compared to the series’ unconventional anti-heroine.
Through following Tonia’s care and mistreatment—feminist theorists have shown that the two are not mutually exclusive—of the chimps that have made her “chimp crazy,” the series elicits shock and laughter from viewers. Goode juxtaposes clips of chimpanzees in dirty cramped cages with slow motion shots of Haddix in kitschy pastel outfits, getting lip injections, or tearfully singing to a Jelly Roll song. She spouts cultural faux pas about her love of primates, claiming she loves chimps “more than [her] kids,” and feeding the chimpanzees food like chicken nuggets and chocolate milk.
While the documentary’s talking heads describe her as “delusional” and “irrational,” she appears genuinely trapped by the force of her emotional draw toward her companion species. As I watched, I sympathized with her. Rather than mock or judge Tonia by enforcing normative interspecies relations, I wondered, what might we learn if we sat with the forces that compelled her to act in these ways? Thinking back on my own fieldwork with lemurs, I realized my feelings toward the primates I study might only be different in degree rather than in kind.
Primate Collisions
One year prior to watching Haddix on my screen, I experienced a moment during my dissertation fieldwork that led me to eventually see her through a more sympathetic lens. One autumn morning in 2023 at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina, I spent a day shadowing one of the center’s staff carers, Sam. The Duke Lemur Center has the most diverse group of captive lemurs in the world and is home to the largest group of lemurs in the United States. I spent the morning watching Sam feed the different lemurs under her care and reorganizing various enclosures. Sam, affable and friendly, seemed happy to answer my incessant questions as she went about her daily tasks. As she finished her tasks toward lunchtime, she asked if I’d like to see the center’s aye-ayes, a long-fingered lemur native to Madagascar. Having not seen these elusive lemurs yet, I answered with an emphatic yes.
When we entered one of the aye-aye wings, the overhead lights—which are on a twelve-hour timer signaling daylight, and thus sleep for the nocturnal lemurs—had just turned off. A mother and daughter pair of aye-ayes named Agatha and Medusa were just starting their day. The space was bathed in dim red light, like a photographer’s dark room, allowing us to spot them climbing around the branches and bars that towered in front of us. While initially they ignored us, the sound of a container of nuts and wax worms that Sam shook alerted them to the snacks we carried. They came down but stayed around five feet away. Their wrinkled pale faces pointed inquisitively toward us. They appeared alien, simultaneously ancient and infantile.
“Do you want to feed them?” asked Sam. I quickly said yes, losing any air of professional distance. As I reached out to each of them with a peanut or a wriggling wax worm in my palm, they took turns climbing over to me and reaching out for my offering. They would first tap on my hands with a long stick-like, bony finger. The taps are part of an echolocation technique aye ayes use on trees to listen for any insects below the bark. They were much bigger than I had expected, more beaver-like in size than squirrel-like, and they were faster than their grizzly visages hinted. I was enamored.
Afterwards, as we walked out, I talked with Sam about how incredible it was to see them. “At the risk of sounding problematic,” I said, “with animals like aye-ayes, I really don’t want to see them go extinct. Same with the indri, for example,” I continued, referring to the large lemur that sings whale-like songs through the rainforests of eastern Madagascar. “I feel bad, but some of the other species seem so similar that I don’t feel like I care as much. I don’t know what it is about them.”
She responded, “Well, you’re captivated. I get it. When I was in [Madagascar], a colleague came up to me and asked, ‘Why do you care about lemurs so much? Why do you want to save them?’ Honestly, I didn’t know how to respond.”
Interspecies Captive-ations
The word “captivated” is an intriguing choice for the sensation we shared. I found myself comforted by her shared sentiment, and the shared inability to explain why I felt like this encounter with the aye-ayes felt so important. Throughout the rest of the day, I thought about what Sam had said.
Etymologically, captivated comes from the Latin word, captivus, or captivity. Merriam-Webster defines it as “having one’s interest or attention held or captured by something or someone charming, beautiful, entertaining, etc.” I felt at the time, and now writing this over a year later, that captivation might be the most accurate way of referencing the feeling I had when meeting Agatha and Medusa.
The very possibility of human captivation obscures the traditional subject/object distinction of the human/animal divide.
Through this experience, I found myself captive in two senses. In the first, and more obvious sense, I felt myself drawn to the lemurs, interested in watching them, in conserving them. In the second sense, however, I felt semantically captive, unable to explain this affective pull toward my other-than-human interlocutor. In this, I felt kinship with Sam, who couldn’t respond to why she cared about lemurs, and even with Tonia Haddix, who felt uncontrollably compelled to care for chimps.
I would therefore like to offer captivation as an analytic for multispecies relations—a type of captivity, one that inverts traditional discussions of power in multispecies relations.
Emphasizing the power of the beyond-human, captivation is a result of their power to put humans into a sort of affective (or emotional) captivity—one that compels people to care for (or hurt) them even though they cannot justify exactly why. In other words, the lemurs in my research (or Tonia’s chimp Tonka) are “vibrant matter,” a concept explored by Jane Bennett. For Bennett, objects in the world (powerlines, potato chips, chemicals etc.) have the power to act in ways that are unexpected.
Such objects, and the way they interact with other objects, cannot be fully understood through human frameworks. Hence, she presents a “flat ontology” of our world. Rather than placing people at the center of reality, Bennett’s “flat ontology” argues that other objects can be understood as existing in the world. This is not to say that all things are the same or have equal value. Instead, she is merely arguing that they equally exist, and in equally existing, they have the capacity to affect others. In being captivated by and caring for lemurs, in ways that they cannot fully explain, carers are implicated into lemur conservation.
I am not the first to use captivation to discuss human-animal relations. Martin Heidegger uses the concepts of umwelt and captivation to argue for the difference between humans and other animals. Umwelt, a concept theorized by biologist Jakob von Uexküll, explains the phenomenal world of different animals. Translated in English as environment, umwelt argues that all animals perceive reality through sensory data that shapes their world. In this way, “all animal subjects, from the simplest to the most complex, are inserted into their environments to the same degree of perfection.”
While multispecies theorists have used umwelt to discuss how different organisms relate to surrounding ecologies, Heidegger uses umwelt to hierarchize humans over “nonhumans.” For him, umwelt theory meant that animals are exclusively captivated (or encaged) by their instincts, while humans are world-forming, or creatively open to the world in ways that do not conform to instinctual need.
While an argument for animal creativity is outside the scope of this piece, I am tempering his distinction between humans and animals by underlining the mutual possibility of captivation. The very possibility of human captivation obscures the traditional subject/object distinction of the human/animal divide. Rather than humans (subjects) having full mastery of nonhumans (objects), captivation illustrates how the latter can impact the former’s behaviors. Captivation illustrates that neither group are sole masters of their own worldly relations.
Who Holds Power?
Interrogating captivation does not erase all power dynamics in these multispecies relations. While the interlocutors I worked with had diverse and well-intentioned attempts at caring for lemurs, it is undeniable that they had more power in the relationships with lemurs, as they were the ones to feed them, provide enrichment, and deliver their medicines. In the case of Tonia Haddix, her captivation of chimpanzees led the latter to experience isolated and lonely lives. Nor does this mean captivation is the only reason behind caring for other-than-humans.
There are myriad anthropological examples of multispecies relations being engendered by cultural norms or socio-political discourse and economic gain. Yuka Suzuki, for example, illustrates how white ranchers use their knowledge of local animals to assert their presence in post-independence Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, in her work on orangutan rehabilitation in Borneo, Juno Parreñas highlights how gender is challenged and resignified through the tough, risky, work of caring for orangutans. And yet, to explain away captivation toward other-than-humans using human socio-politics would be to simultaneously underestimate the potential of those other-than-human beings and overestimate humans’ ability to separate themselves from beyond-human companions.
We see this with the logic-defying behaviors people have around other-than-humans. The captivation that other-than-humans command over humans can lead the latter into precarious situations. An example of this is the financial precarity that comes with working in the zoological field. Many of the carers at the Duke Lemur Center who I spoke to noted that they worked multiple jobs when first getting involved in the zoological field. Others underlined the fact that “you go where the jobs are.”
One interlocutor from the Duke Lemur Center told me how her previous employment working with animals was incredibly professionally toxic, and yet “you get sucked in because you care so much.” Throughout Chimp Crazy, we see Tonia have a similar experience. This is not to say the zoo professionals I worked with and Tonia are comparable, but rather that their relationships with other-than-humans move them to do things that are unexpected or even detrimental to their lives.
Cages of Care
In the final episode of Chimp Crazy, director Goode interviews a reporter who covered Tonia’s story. During the interview, the reporter mentions how much she enjoys talking with Tonia, who is chatty and outgoing. Then, however, her tone switches when she talks about a photo of Tonia in the room where she kept Tonka. Despite her friendly relationship with Haddix, the reporter says that on seeing the photo, “It just kind of hits you that this is where he was being kept for a year and alone, with no other chimps… and I think this really becomes clear. To me, I question, does she not see what other people can see?”
The photo portrays Tonia, strikingly pink against an azure wall. She stands in Tonka’s cage, staring through the glass. She has occupied the literal space of the other-than-human. She is alone, unsmiling, hands placed resolutely on the table. Captivation in interspecies relations results in varying outcomes. It has the potential to create positive forms of natural and cultural solidarity, as is often shown through Donna Haraway’s writings.
Sometimes, however, it results in disastrous outcomes for all species involved. In extreme cases, like that of Chimp Crazy, captivation can leave one like Haddix—having hurt the species that so captivated her, sorrowful, in a cage of (not quite) her own making.
Featured Image: Tonia Haddix stands inside Tonka’s cage. Image courtesy of HBO.
Quinn Georgic is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. He is interested in the intersection of contemporary conservation regimes and discourses on gender, race, and the environment. His dissertation focuses on the production of primatological and conservation knowledge surrounding wild and captive lemurs. Contact.
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