Is primate primitivism a form of simian relativism?

I know I shouldn’t watch TV, but in the wee hours of the morning the other night, I woke up, went downstairs and turned on the damned thing in the hope of inducing drowsiness. As I flipped through the channels, my attention was drawn to one of those sensationalistic animal attack programs, this one being about attacks on humans by pet chimpanzees. Now, I think anyone who keeps a chimp as a pet has a huge responsibility, and probably ought to be very rich, with plenty of space, as well as a hired keeper to help, because these animals are intelligent and dangerous, and they can become very neurotic in captivity. But that does not mean I think there should be yet another federal law (which is proposed, but not yet passed) making it a felony to have a pet chimp! Policing pets in private homes — no matter how dangerous they are — is just not the federal government’s business.
But my libertarian disgust makes me digress. The propriety of federal legislation is not what this post is about. What intrigued me about this program was the especially horrendous — and especially tragic — nature of a particular attack, as well as the reactions of people to it.
The story began with a baby chimp adopted in 1967 by a kindly American who was visiting Africa when he happened upon the baby attempting frantically to nurse off his mother’s dead body (she had been killed by poachers). This moved the American deeply, and he adopted the baby, naming him “Moe” and bringing back to be raised like a human baby by him and his wife, who lived in the Los Angeles area. They certainly did about as good a job as can reasonably be done with a chimp, for Moe reached adulthood, and it wasn’t until he was in his thirties that problems developed, and he bit people. Not his adoptive parents, but a police officer and a woman who had been warned not to put her hand in his cage but did so anyway. This resulted in the city of West Covina going in and forcibly removing Moe from his loving home, and taking him to chimp sanctuaries where he was apparently grieving for his adoptive parents, and they for him. Endless litigation to get Moe back ensued (replete with neighbor petitions demanding him back), and the couple spent huge amounts of time driving back and forth from these sanctuaries.
The gruesome attack occurred at a sanctuary in Bakersfield, in 2005. It was Moe’s birthday, and they showed up to celebrate with cake, which they were sharing with Moe, who was locked in a cage, and who was not the attacker. The attackers, two teenage chimps with known violent backgrounds, were roaming free, and they were apparently provoked when the woman made the mistake of meeting the gaze of one of them. He flew into a rage, bit off her thumb and part of her hand, and when the husband intervened to save his wife, the pair literally tore him to pieces. Poor Moe simply stared at all of this from inside his cage.
As the woman related the details, showing what was left of her hand, I assumed in my only half-awake state that her husband had died, for surely no one would survive such injuries. I went back to bed.
The next day, using Google, I learned I had been mistaken. Incredibly, the man did survive. Minus his nose, his face, his buttocks, many fingers, parts of his legs, and both testicles. From a 2005 account titled “The Animal Within — They Tamed Moe. But Two Other Chimps Heeded the Brutal Call of the Wild“:

She cut two pieces of cake. When St. James handed one to Moe through an opening in the cage, the chimp dug in immediately, smearing blue icing all over his lips.
As LaDonna moved to cut her own piece, she glimpsed something to her left. It was one of the teenage male chimps. He was out of his cage.
“I made eye contact with him,” she says. “That instantly changed his demeanor.”
He slammed into her backside, knocking her into St. James. She thinks she must have thrown her arm around her husband’s neck, and just like that, the chimp “just chomped off my thumb.”
Her husband pushed her under the table, and the chimps — because now a second had appeared — turned their frenzy on him.
LaDonna watched as one latched onto St. James’s head, the other onto his foot. And here, she chokes on the words: “They virtually were — I don’t know how you say it — eating him alive.”
Davis says she screamed and the Brauers’ son-in-law, Mark Carruthers, came running. She cried to him, “He’s killing James!”
Carruthers retrieved a handgun, according to Davis and police accounts. He had to struggle to find a clear shot. As Buddy, the larger male, lifted his head, Carruthers came in close and fired a single bullet into the animal’s brain.
As Buddy fell away, Ollie began dragging St. James’s mutilated body down a walkway. The 62-year-old man was conscious but near death. He had lost his nose, an eye, most of his fingers, both testicles and much of the flesh from his buttocks and face and left foot, but the chimp was not done with him yet.

At the time of the article the man was clinging to life in a medically induced coma. He lived, and (via Overlawyered) there’s a gruesome picture of what he looked like when he finally left the hospital. (Trust me, it’s AYOR.)
This guy should have been dead, and the ability of medical technology to save people from horrendous injuries never ceases to amaze me.
What fascinates me the most, though, is the way humans react:

Why did they do it?
It’s the question that hangs over almost every conversation about the case. Chimp attacks on humans are highly unusual. How could this have happened to people who knew and loved these creatures so well? Why did it get so ugly?
USC’s Stanford [professor of anthropology and biology at the University of Southern California] gets frustrated with this kind of talk. “If a tiger attacked these people, you wouldn’t say, ‘Why was this tiger angry?’ ” he says.

Now that is an excellent point.
It is the fact that this was a chimpanzee attack that makes it so especially horrifying. If a tiger mauled someone in the same way, sure there’d be horror expressed over the tragic injuries, but no one would say “imagine a tiger attacking a person like that!”
Even a vicious dog attacking and mauling a person does not generate the same almost instinctive feeling of horror, because we recognize that dogs are domesticated predators, and to that extent, are not fully “like us.” Simians are, because we are simian. Moreover, we have been (at least, much of the baby boom generation was) heavily influenced by the National Geographic, Jane Goodall style romanticizing of our closest simian relative, and there’s a sort of worship of them that’s evocative of the “noble savage” nonsense.
But it would be simplistic to say that we are horrified by the chimp attacking because we think they are “like us.” Because if a human did the same thing, most people would recoil and call the attacker a vicious, insane psychopath, with those who believe in capital punishment demanding that such a monster be executed ASAP. The irony, of course, is that even the most cursory look at human history reveals that humans have maimed and mutilated — and continue to maim and mutilate — far, far more human beings than do our closest simian relatives. If we compare the odds of being savagely mutilated by chimpanzees with the odds of being savagely mutilated by people — even in an area populated by both chimps and humans — it’s a no-brainer to lay the money on human attackers.
This is not to say that humans are “worse” than chimps, for we are not. Humans have developed (or, at least, we are supposed to have developed) what is called civilization, with rules and standards for civilized human behavior. Chimps have not, nor can they. They will always retain the capacity for being brutal simian killer apes — even if we have mythologized this away in what I would call a classic example of simple denial. As to what’s behind the human need for this denial, perhaps it is fear. Not of apes, but of ourselves — in our primitive, pre-civilized evolutionary state. For some strange reason I can’t quite penetrate, we seem to want the apes to be “better” than we are. Perhaps it is related to the love of all things primitive, and the ridiculous idea that children are “innocent.” And if apes are in fact as capable of murderous and vicious atrocities as adult human beings are, then there’s nothing “better” about being in a childlike and primitive state.
So out goes that myth.
Furthermore, if we are horrified to see our closest relatives in the animal kingdom showing the same primitive dark side that humans have but generally keep under control, it might also be because we worry about ourselves, and need the myth that our closest relatives are not like us but are actually peaceful creatures — thus creating the narrative that our violent tendencies are somehow “unnatural.”
Back to Professor Stanford:

The chimps were out of their cage, and out of their comfort zone. Moe was the new, threatening male on the scene who needed to be taken down a peg, but they couldn’t get at him. So “they attacked the first individuals they came across who were in their immediate territory.”
For the ugly truth is that these kinds of attacks are quite common — in the wild, against other chimpanzees. The males are highly territorial; if threatened, they will shred a rival’s genitals, rip out his windpipe.
“They just have the same tendencies as all of us,” says Stanford. “Some individuals can be violent and nasty, others not.”

The more human such behavior looks to us humans, the more shattering it is to the myth.