R.I.P. Travis.....

And I'm not talking about the band 'Travis' from Scotland, although whatever happened to them??? - they were great!

Travis the Chimp has been on my mind all this week, (I have been eating bananas like nobody's business), at the time of writing this, it has been about 5 days since the 14 year-old, 200 pound Chimpanzee viciously attacked the 55 year-old friend of his owner and was subsequently stabbed and shot until he was no more.

Some are saying he was sick with Lyme disease, some say he was confused and aggravated, and others claim that a lifetime of essentially being raised as a human caused the horrific encounter - and while I have no expertise with which to add any useful analysis - it's that final point that does get my head-buzzing.

Travis, for all intents and purposes, WAS raised as a human - he was a movie and TV star, he wore nappies, he apparently even knew how to navigate the Internet.....but here's where the problem lies; Travis never basked in the glory of an acting career like a human would, he wasn't spared nappies after his first few years of life - like humans are, and when he discovered the audio of Christian Bale's outburst on the Internet- he had no way of communicating this the way a human might.

My point is, if you're gonna raise an animal as a human, you better be able to give them all the experiences and opportunities a human gets - from eating and sleeping, to paying overdue fines on late DVDs and uploading wacky photos to face book.

The case of Travis the chimp made me shudder for more than the obvious reasons, it also made me think of a situation in 1982 which could've so easily gone the wrong way. That year - a boy named Elliott discovered a visitor in his family's shed, at first, his brother Michael thought it was an iguana, it wasn't - it was an unknown species from another planet. Elliott befriended the creature and christened him 'E.T.'

There were plenty of circumstances here that most likely parallel Travis's situation; E.T. was dressed up like a human, taken trick-or-treating, and developed a love for M&M's, Beer, Bert & Ernie as well as Gertie's 'Speak and Spell'. E.T. was absorbing human behaviour at an alarming rate and worst of all Elliott wanted to keep him - Hell, I wanted Elliott to keep him. But who knows where this may have lead, if Elliott had had his way who's to say that in 1996, (when the alien was 14 years into living like a human) E.T. wouldn't have suddenly flipped out and torn Elliott limb from limb because he had never been allowed to use the phone to call home - like a human is allowed to.

I don't want to colour your impression of E.T. - I don't think it would've ever come to that....but maybe that was the tragedy of Travis....no-one thought it would've ever come to this.