LIKE many longtime couples, Carlie and Bob, independent animal rescue workers in upstate New York who have been together 21 years, have a difference of opinion about one big issue in their relationship. In their case, it is about a 7-year-old Hamadryas baboon named Higgins, who spends a good part of most evenings watching HDTV in his heated monkey house, often holding hands with Bob. Carlie thinks that it is time to ship Higgins to a baboon preserve, and Bob wants to keep him at home.

Phil Mansfield for The New York Times
BEHIND BARS Bob raised Higgins, a baboon, from infancy. Because Higgins has attacked him, he keeps him caged in a heated building where they often watch TV.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Carlie says. “I only believe people should have pets that are domestic animals. Bob believes that everything is fair game. He would have a lion if I let him.”

Did Carlie say HDTV?

“Yeah,” says Carlie. “I only got one at Christmas. Higgins has had one for about a year. He’s a TV fanatic. If you forget to turn it off, he’ll be sitting there at 3 in the morning.

“His favorites are ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and ‘Walker, Texas Ranger.’ ”

Bob, who’s owned wild animals all his life, admits Higgins has not always been a model pet. When Higgins was 3, he slept with the couple, often awakening Bob in the morning by climbing to the bedroom rafters and dropping onto Bob’s stomach. On one occasion, they got in a wrestling match, and Higgins put one of his “steel-like fingernails” through Bob’s scrotum.

Bob has considered moving him to a sanctuary, but “I’m just too attached to him,” he says.

Bob — who agreed to be photographed but would speak only on the condition that his and Carlie’s last names and hometown not be published, for fear of harassment from “ill-informed bleeding hearts” — is not the only human who has lost his heart to an inappropriate primate.

Last week, the country was mesmerized by the story of Sandra Herold, a 70-year-old widow in Stamford, Conn., whose 14-year-old, 200-pound chimpanzee, Travis, horribly mauled a close friend of the owner, tearing off her face. Ms. Herold, whose daughter had died in a car accident, had developed a relationship with him that went far beyond the ordinary owner-pet dynamic. She referred to Travis as her son, spoke of sleeping and bathing with him when he was small, and, in an interview with Jeff Rossen on the “Today” show, showed off his drawings, which, like a parent, she kept on the refrigerator door.

There are not many privately owned chimpanzees in the country — a census conducted for the Great Ape Project, an advocacy group, puts the number at about 225 — but there are many thousands of pet primates. Regardless of primates’ species or size, the people who keep them as pets seem to have a remarkably consistent way of looking at them. Even Bob, who condemns what he sees as Ms. Herold’s irresponsible sentimentality for permitting an adult chimpanzee to roam free so often (“she was delusional,” he says, “she anthropomorphized the primate to such a degree that he was more human than chimpanzee”), can’t help but acknowledge the unusually strong connection.

“He’s very beguiling,” Bob says. “He puts his hand out, looks at you with those beautiful brown eyes, and you feel compelled to hold hands.”

“I’d love to say he loves me,” Bob says scrupulously. “But he can’t.”

“He eats grapes with me,” he went on. “I can pick from his bowl. Unless it’s something he really likes.”

Bob’s feeling may have something to do, in this case as in many others, with the circumstances under which he first got to know his animal. After he paid $1,500 to a dealer in Missouri, Higgins arrived, at about 3 months old, in diapers, with a bottle. Although he had his own cage, in his own room, he often slept in the couple’s bed. Bob changed his diapers several times a day, and often took him to work at his construction equipment business, slipping him under his shirt. On the way back, they would get Higgins an ice cream.

Read more of thLIKE many longtime couples, Carlie and Bob, independent animal rescue workers in upstate New York who have been together 21 years, have a difference of opinion about one big issue in their relationship. In their case, it is about a 7-year-old Hamadryas baboon named Higgins, who spends a good part of most evenings watching HDTV in his heated monkey house, often holding hands with Bob. Carlie thinks that it is time to ship Higgins to a baboon preserve, and Bob wants to keep him at home.

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