He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings. Another distinguishing characteristic: "When he didn't like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them," Priest said. Still, Cobb told the station, "He wasn't a chimp that caused a lot of problems. In the wild, the average chimp survives 25 to 35 years, she said, and they can live 35 to 45 years in zoos.
Another chimpanzee named Cheeta lives on a primate sanctuary in Southern California named C. The sanctuary's creator, Dan Westfall, said on its web site that he was saddened to hear of Cheetah's passing in Florida.
He said he and others at the sanctuary "send our deepest sympathies to our colleagues at Suncoast. Westfall writes on the site that he was told Cheeta was one of the original chimps in the Tarzan movies during the s and s. However, when he began working with a writer on Cheeta's biography, research revealed "that our Cheeta is unlikely to be as old as we'd thought, although he is clearly old," Westfall wrote. People from several countries offered condolences for Cheetah on the Florida sanctuary's site in several different languages.
A few credited him with helping them develop a love for animals. Thanks Cheetah for all the good times you had and made us all laugh. If he died at 80, Cheetah's long lifespan would have made him one of the oldest chimpanzees in history. Even in captivity, the animals rarely live past The character was created especially for the Weissmuller Tarzan films and did not appear in the original books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Another Cheeta — this time with no "h" at the end of his name — was exposed as a fake in by Washington Post journalist RD Rosen, who had been asked to write a biography of him.
In later years the fake Cheeta had found himself marketed as a painter of "ape-stract art", with several canvases exhibited at London's National Gallery. However, Rosen discovered that the cigar-smoking, paint-daubing impostor was born in or and had never been in a Tarzan film. The fake Cheeta's story inspired an acclaimed spoof biography by British writer James Lever. Me Cheeta: The Autobiography flagged up the preposterous nature of the Cheeta myth by presenting the tale of a monkey stolen from deepest Africa and forced to make a living among the fake jungles and outrageous stars of Hollywood's golden age.
The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw described it as "one of the smartest comic novels of recent years — a devastatingly clever, brilliantly written spoof autobiography". Cheeta's slippery reputation even seems to have passed by osmosis on to Lever, who was at one point was heavily rumoured to be a front for a better known author such as Martin Amis. On hearing of Cheetah's death he said: "Nobody seems to know very much or even anything at all about the chimps who played Cheetah. I rather think he'll be dying a lot over the next few years.
Sadly for fans of the Weissmuller-era Tarzan, the animal closest to being the "real" Cheetah was probably a chimpanzee named Jiggs , who died from pneumonia in and was buried in the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park.
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