Now the REAL STORY of Monkey Love Comes Out

Uhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmm, okay. This shit just gets weirder. I'd still like to be Sandra's monkey bitch. Damn. Lobster and filet mignon, people!

IMPORTANT REMINDER: We're not here to judge.

By God, if Mercer does a crayon drawing for Mom, that shit is going up on the damn fridge! That shit is going to be proudly displayed!

I do really like the quote below in bold. It made me laugh. Obviously, SOMEONE thinks they are here to judge! We'll leave it to the "friend."

IT'S ANIMAL ATTRACTION
By PERRY CHIARAMONTE in Stamford, Conn., and JEREMY OLSHAN in New York, AP

February 19, 2009

She fed him filet mignon and lobster tails. They shared cozy glasses of wine. They bathed and slept together. He tenderly brushed her hair. She gave him gifts and sweet kisses. He drew her pictures.

But this was no ordinary affair of the heart. Sandra Herold was engaging in these loving acts with a 200-pound pet ape.

Herold's human friends said they were always leery of the interspecies intimacy.

If you love a simian, set them free, some tried to tell her - long before Travis went bananas Monday and mauled and mangled Herold's 55-year-old friend Charla Nash.

"It's just weird," one friend said. "It's an animal, not a person. What she had with that monkey was not normal."

It is not uncommon for people to replace the affection of a departed loved one with that of an animal, experts say.

Travis became both a surrogate child and spouse, following the deaths of her daughter in a car accident several years ago and her husband five years ago, friends and psychologists said.

Even if there was no monkey-panky, pals say they were intimate.

"In popular culture, chimpanzees are used as a kind of parody of human behavior - and it seems that this animal became almost a parody of her relationship with her husband," said Howard Welsh, a professor of clinical psychiatry at NYU.

"At the same time, this woman was depriving this animal of a whole world. She made this world for the chimp simply her. He was a chimp in a gilded cage."

Travis lived his entire life in Herold's habitat. In his younger days, he appeared in commercials, including spots for Old Navy and Coca-Cola, but mostly he was hers and hers alone.

He worshipped her, friends said. Travis would make crayon drawings and proudly hand them to Herold.

"I put them on the refrigerator for him," the shaken woman said on NBC yesterday.

Herold said she has nothing left now that her daughter, her husband and the animal she raised from the age of 3 weeks are gone.

"I'm, like, hollow now," she told CBS. "He slept with me every night. He combed my hair. Everything in the house is for him."

Herold would frequently tell those who questioned her devotion to Travis that they simply did not understand.

"Until you've . . . eaten with a chimp and bathed with a chimp, you don't know a chimp," she said.

The events leading up to the vicious attack are still unclear.

According to police, Herold said Travis had been agitated during the day and she slipped some unprescribed Xanax to calm him down - a claim on which she has wavered. Tuesday, she said he refused the drug, but yesterday morning she said she provided the drug only five minutes prior to the attack, and stressed that it "wouldn't have had time to kick in."

Herold insisted that Travis was never violent.

She contends Travis was being protective of her when he attacked Nash, who she said was driving a different car, wearing a new hairstyle and playfully shook an Elmo stuffed toy in front of her face as a present to the chimp.

"She had the toy in front of her. This was just a freak thing," Herold said.

"It was the most horrible thing that could ever happen," she said. "For me to do something like that - put a knife in him - was like putting one in myself. Then he turned around and was like, 'Mom, what did you do?' "

Police have said they are looking into the possibility of criminal charges. A pet owner can be held criminally responsible if he or she knew or should have known that an animal was a danger to others.

Nash was in critical condition in Stamford Hospital yesterday. Doctors said she has made slight progress after undergoing more than seven hours of surgery Monday to stabilize her.