‘I watched myself being eaten alive by a chimp and now I’m a Gorilla Whisperer’
A woman whose arm was almost ripped off by an aggressive chimpanzee has relived the horror moment she was forced to watch herself “being eaten alive.”
Angelique Todd was working as a volunteer zoo-keeper when 33-year-old Bustah the chimp made a sudden grab at her sleeve while she fed him, pulling her arm through the bars of his cage.
He only let go when a member of the public managed to distract him at Port Lympne Zoo Park near Folkestone, Kent.
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Speaking to Our World in 2004 in a video that has recently been republished on YouTube, Angelique said: “I knew this chimp for three years.
(Image: Our World/YouTube)
“I had quite a good relationship with him.
“Male chimpanzees in captivity in general, you have to be careful with them, they are one of the most dangerous animals in the zoo.
“They can be very aggressive, very fiesty so you always are cautious.”
But one fateful day in 1994, Bustah was in a “dangerous” mood and a small gap under his cage gave him just enough room to strike.
(Image: Getty Images/Moment RF)
“He saw his opportunity and he took it,” Angelique said.
“These kind of events, you go in slow motion, you’re in shock, you’re trying to survive.
“First of all, I thought I could take off my coat and he could just get my coat. Then I tried pulling my arm back and there was just no point in doing that whatsoever.
“I couldn’t provide any resistance, he was just so strong. It was pure survival. I was watching myself being eaten alive.”
Angelique described how Bustah bit off her thumb and index finger before “working himself up my arm.”
“All my arteries were severed. I lost a huge amount of muscle mass – almost all of it in fact – and I still have tooth wounds on either side of my arm – but this is much much improved.”
But in the aftermath of the terrifying ordeal, Angelique said she was not angry with Bustah adding that he “must’ve got over-excited.”
“I think what he wanted to do was just get hold of me. I think initially, it was just ‘I can get hold of her, I can see a hole, there’s a way that I can grab her’ and that’s what his initial reaction was.
“After he bit my thumb off obviously the blood started spurting out, then it became kind of like a feeding frenzy.”
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Angelique added: “I continued working at the zoo a little while after my accident…it was felt that it was very important for me to go and see this chimp for counselling reasons.
“When I went back, he couldn’t look at me in the face. He just had his head on the ground all the time and whether one interprets that as remorse or that he knows that he did a bad thing, I don’t know.”
The ordeal didn’t put Angelique off working with animals – in fact it was quite the opposite and she ended up becoming a biologist, swapping her life in Tunbridge Wells for the African jungle where she worked as a researcher for the World Wide Fund For Nature.
There she lived among gorillas for over a decade and even “learned to speak their language,” earning the nickname, The Gorilla Whisperer.
Her inspiring work even featured in the documentary, My Gorilla Family.
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