![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/f325bf592a5227801b0af005265fe65269-tonia-chimpcrazy.rsquare.w330.jpg\")
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Tonia Haddix, the Missouri woman who kept chimpanzees in cages under PETA-protested conditions and rose to national fame\/shame after being featured in the 2024 HBO docuseries Chimp Crazy<\/a>, was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison on August 7, Fox 2<\/a> reports. She was convicted of two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice\u00a0for lying to a judge and saying that Tonka the chimpanzee had died before federal authorities came to collect her apes. She pleaded guilty to the charges in March. Tonka, who appeared in Hollywood movies like George of the Jungle and Buddy, was later found alive in her basement. After Haddix was released on bail in July, officials found that she had broken the terms of her bond by keeping a different unregistered chimp in her basement.<\/p>\n \u201cNow that Tonia Haddix is locked up, she\u2019s getting a taste of the suffering she inflicted on animals by imprisoning them in cages and denying them any semblance of a natural life,\u201d PETA Foundation general counsel for Captive Animal Law Enforcement Brittany Peet said in a statement reacting to the sentencing on August 7. \u201cPETA is relieved to see justice done and urges everyone to support the Captive Primate Safety Act, which will keep vulnerable monkeys and apes out of the pet trade and the hands of ruthless dealers like Haddix.\u201d<\/p>\n As for Tonka? As shown in the last episode of Chimp Crazy, he was rescued and brought to Save the Chimps Sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida, in 2022. There, he formed a close bond with another chimpanzee named Cayleb \u2014 who staff realized is actually his son. According to Tonka\u2019s bio<\/a>, he now has a family that consists of 17 chimps, and life couldn\u2019t be more different than his basement-dwelling days: \u201cWith the freedom to choose between being inside or outside on his three-acre island home, Tonka is making up for his years in a cage by soaking up the Florida sunshine, playing and relaxing with his family, and painting.\u201d<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tonia Haddix, the Missouri woman who kept chimpanzees in cages under PETA-protested conditions and rose to national fame\/shame…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[38105,49,48,17536,44,66,38104,37466,323],"class_list":["post-57561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-apeshit","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-chimp-crazy","tag-news","tag-science","tag-sentencing","tag-tonia-haddix","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}