28-08-2015, 03:30 PM
IX OF DOGS AND MONKEYS
The public life of Jim Jones began, progressed and ended with his manipulation of dogs and monkeys. Throughout his career, Jones surrounded himself with a variety of animals. These were the pet mascots for his preliminary experiments in behaviour modification that helped him to develop his tremendous power to manipulate people. Over the years, these animals provided their master with money, recruits, favorable publicity and security guards for his Peoples Temple. They helped maintain the fallacy that Jones was a humanitarian who suffered constant attacks from racist enemies. In the final analysis, the Temple's animals provide an insight into the mind of Jim Jones. Perhaps the most accurate accounting of the Reverend Jim Jones comes from viewing his career through the eyes of dogs and monkeys.
The first congregation of the child preacher's "pretend church" was comprised of several stray dogs that young Jim had adopted. His canine congregation followed the Bible-toting boy everywhere he went and sat patiently whenever he practiced preaching to them.
Jones' pretend church grew to include the other children in his neighborhood but it remained oriented towards animals as Jim's primary function was to conduct funeral services for his playmates' deceased pets. Judging from his later treatment of animals, it is highly possible that young Jim murdered the pets just for the opportunity to officiate at the funerals. Jim Jones learned at an early age that a dead animal could give him power over people.
Years later, in an effort to finance his Peoples Temple, Jones embarked on the most absurd fund-raising campaign in religious history. He sold live Rhesus monkeys door-to-door. According to an interview published in the Indianapolis News on December 5th, 1953, Jones got the idea from an unidentified South American student who promised that there was money to be made in the monkey business. His first acquisition was a pet chimpanzee that he trained in table manners and the use of the toilet. Jones named the chimp "Sugar." Sugar enjoyed all the privileges of the other members of the household but received most of the attention as Jones had began an intensive study in primate behaviour. Sugar would die of strychnine poisoning. By Jones' account, he then imported several dozen Rhesus monkeys from South America, Africa, Thailand and India, housed them in his garage and sold them, one at a time, for $29 each. The local Black residents must have been quite surprised to discover the young White preacher at their door with a Bible in one hand and a live monkey in the other. It was the Christmas season and Jones convinced many parents that a monkey would make an excellent present for their children. The unlikely combination of salvation, racial equality and monkeys was successful in raising funds while providing a foot-in-the-door to recruit new parishioners. It was also good publicity; at least for a while.
A front page article in the Indianapolis Star, dated April 10, 1954, heralded the death of Jones' monkey business. According to the report, Jones had abandoned a recent shipment in the customs warehouse in the Federal building in Indianapolis when he refused the air-freight bill. Of the seven monkeys in the crate, three had died in transit and the remaining four were very sick. Despite efforts by the customs officials to nurse the four back to health, only two survived to be sold at the unclaimed freight auction. Though the article tarnished the preacher's reputation, it did serve to disguise the true source of the monkeys.
It would have been impossible for Jones to have profited from the sale of imported monkeys at $29 each, the cost of the operation was too prohibitive. Aside from the normal business overhead, there was the high cost of international communications, the initial price of the monkeys, the expensive crating and air freight to Indianapolis, the high mortality loss in shipment, the required vaccinations against communicable cable disease and, of course, bananas, bananas and more bananas. Jones, whose business background which would later build an empire valued between $20 and $50 million, would never have sold at a loss. Indeed, he did sell several dozen Rhesus monkeys for $29 each but they had not been imported. Jones had acquired the monkeys from a domestic research laboratory where they were to be used as subjects in medical experiments. Fearing that his association with the research lab might prove embarassing, if not incriminating, Jones staged a media manipulation by ordering a token shipment, refusing to accept it and reporting his activities to the local newspaper.
The monkey business was bizarre but important as it established Jones' early interest in behavioural science and his covert association with a medical research laboratory that apparently was of sufficient size that the loss of several dozen lab animals went unnoticed. It also attests to his ability to manipulate the press, a skill he would later hone to perfection, as well as his devious, yet intelligent, planning, as this one project built the first Peoples Temple with money, parishioners, publicity and purpose as the first in many studies in behaviour modification. In retrospect, the monkey business had all the elements of sadistic irony that marked the Temple's future projects. Whenever Jones set the record wrong he provided posterity with a glimpse of his sick sense of humour. The fact that this son of a Ku Klux Klan officer bankrolled his self-destructive interracial church by selling monkeys to his prospective Black victims is, in itself, a racial slur. There is also strong symbolism in selling lab animals to finance a medical experiment that used "lab people." It was almost as if the experiments in behaviour modification had progressed to the point where Jones, or his superiors, said, "Out with the monkeys; in with the Blacks" and, with his talent for logical planning, Jones accomplished both goals in one step.
Once he completed the transition from selling monkeys to saving Blacks, Jones returned to murdering dogs in an attempt to control people. The Indianapolis Temple was full of new Black faces but Jones realized he needed to do something spectacular to keep their attention and ensure their return. He also knew that nothing could bind a group closer than the threat of a common enemy. Since their only common enemy was Jones, himself, he proceeded to invent a fictitious one. From the very beginning, Jones claimed that his doctrine of racial equality and Utopian socialism had made him a target for the racist Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party. According to Jones, he was constantly harassed by threatening phone calls and night riding vigilantes who vandalized his parsonage. He tried very hard to impress upon his predominantly Black congregation that he was somehow a champion for their cause.
Jones had converted his then defunct monkey house into an animal shelter where he fed and found homes for stray dogs, one in particular. He brought the dog to church services and introduced it to the congregation as a wayward stray that he had compassionately adopted as his personal pet. The following Sunday morning, the congregation arrived at the Temple to discover that the building had been vandalized during the night. There was garbage spread on the front steps and swastikas painted in red on the doors. Over the entrance were written the words, "Nigger Lover." The faithful ascended the steps, passed the garbage, and into the door marked "Nigger." In the vestibule they had to side-step the corpse of their preacher's "pet dog." Its throat had been slit and the body had obviously been thrown through a nearby broken window. There was a large puddle of blood on the floor and, for the first time, the parishioners realized that the warnings on the church facade had been painted in dog's blood. They proceeded to take their places inside with the uneasy silence of a wake. When everyone was assembled, Jones made his entrance.
The air was electrified with anticipation as he walked stiff, tight-lipped and determined to the pulpit. He paused long enough to make eye contact with each of his followers and then, in the loudest voice he could muster, he screamed, "Nigger Lover! Nigger Lover! You better believe I'm a nigger lover!" The audience roared in wild applause, spurred on by White provocateurs positioned throughout the crowd. Pent up emotions from years of discriminatory treatment were released and focused on this one dramatic incident. The scheme succeeded, not only in drawing the congregation closer to Jones, but in spreading the word to other Blacks that the young White preacher was a champion of their cause. Blacks flocked to the Peoples Temple as a sanctuary from the retribution of an enemy that they perceived as growing stronger with each passing day. It was amazing what Jones could accomplish with a dead dog, a broken window and a few cans of garbage.
When the Temple moved to California in 1965, Jones made the trip in the company of his family, his Black maid and a stray dog with her litter of puppies - - all in the same car. The dogs were important as, even before he established a permanent headquarters for the Temple, he opened another animal shelter. The Redwood Valley shelter introduced the Reverend Jones to the tiny Northern California community as a civic-minded "good Samaritan" and provided an endless supply of stray dogs for his use. Once the new Peoples Temple building was completed, unseen vigilantes again hurled dead dogs onto Temple property. This time, Jones blamed the Nazis and the John Birch Society, as the Ku Klux Klan was not active in Northern California. He used the incident as an excuse to tighten security at the church and to explain the high metal fence that was erected around the perimeter. The fence apparently did not deter the alleged enemies of the Temple as they simply threw the dead dogs over the gate and onto the front lawn. Barbed wire was added to the fence, a guard tower was built at the front gate, search lights were installed and sentries, with trained German Shepherds, twenty-four hours a patrolled the compound day. The Redwood Valley Temple evolved to look very much like a Nazi concentration camp and when anyone asked why, the answer boiled down to dead dogs.
Though the dead dog tactic was, once again, successful in achieving the desired results, it was a mistake for Jones to stage the deceit in California. This was a new Peoples Temple, 2,000 miles from the old one, with a new membership and, according to Jones, a new set of invisible enemies that, against all odds, employed the same tactics as his alleged enemies in Indianapolis. The use of dead dogs in Indiana as well Indianapolis. as in California provides posterity with an obvious clue that Jones, himself, had perpetuated all the deaths. Jones realized that most people are as appalled at the murder of a helpless dog as they are a the murder of a fellow human being. With his understanding of human nature, he was able to create martyrs for his cause without risking capital punishment. The penalty for killing a dog is, at worst, a sharp reprimand from the SPCA and a nominal fine from the courts, yet it was just as effective as the murder of a human advocate of the Peoples Temple.
All of the dogs in the Redwood Valley animal shelter were put to use. Temple aides would call on prospective recruits under the pretext of giving away free puppies from the shelter. Once inside the prospect's home, the conversation would change to a dissertation on the good works of Jim Jones and an invitation to attend the next services at the Temple. The technique was a variation on the monkey business in Indiana but this time the prospective recruits were mostly Native Americans as there were very few Blacks living in the Redwood Valley area. Jones would later look to the ghettoes of San Francisco and Oakland to complete the required number of Black parishioners. Temple aide Carolyn Layton provided a record of the puppy give-away program in a typed memorandum dated June 21, 1973, in which she described a recent housecall,
(basis of C (call) giving away puppies--Mrs. S--_________ wants a dog Melvina says.[155]
The older canines in the shelter, which were too large for the puppy program, were trained as attack dogs and released in the Temple's compound at night. Their presence was as effective at keeping parishioners inside the building as it was in keeping the alleged enemies out. When the Temple moved its headquarters from Redwood Valley to San Francisco, Jones ordered Jim McElvane and Jack Beam to shoot the thirty or so remaining dogs in the kennel and bury them in a large pit on Temple property because they had outlived their purpose.
In 1973, Jones acquired a new mascot for his Redwood Valley Temple, a young chimpanzee he named "Mr. Muggs." Mr. Muggs was introduced to the congregation in the first issue of the Temple Reporter, published late in the summer of 1973. According to Jeannie Mills, a member of the Temple's publication staff,
After thousands of papers had been printed and folded, Jim found a sentence that had to be deleted. We destroyed thousands of papers because of that one sentence. In an article about "Mr. Muggs," the chimpanzee that our church had adopted, the newspaper stated that Muggs had been saved from scientific experimentation. Jim was afraid that sentence (containing the word 'vivisection') might offend the scientific community, so we had to reprint the entire paper saying that Muggs had been "grossly mistreated."[156]
Jones was certainly not afraid of offending the scientific community in general as much as he was afraid of exposing the particular medical research laboratory that had given Mr. Muggs to him. For the second time in his career, he had gone to great lengths to suppress the identity of the benefactor of his monkeys. In all probability, Mr. Muggs came from the Berkeley laboratory of Dr. Lawrence Layton, the former chief of the Chemical Warfare Division, whose family played such a prominent role in the Peoples Temple and the experiment in Jonestown.
In addition to serving as the Temple's mascot and living testimony to Jones' humanitarian heart, Muggs provided another important service to the Redwood Valley compound. Muggs's huge outdoor cage was built near the entrance to the estate in order to camouflage the guard tower, searchlights and short wave radio antenna that were installed on its roof. To outside observers, who questioned the concentration camp setting, Temple members would respond that the unusual structure was not a guard tower but the home of Mr. Muggs, the chimpanzee that their beloved leader had rescued from a torturous existence at the hands of its former owner.
Sometime in 1974, Mr. Muggs was shipped from California to Jonestown with the advance party that cleared the jungle floor for cultivation. Following the carnage in 1978, Max Krebs, the U.S. Ambassador to Guyana from 1974 to 1976, provided a statement to the Congressional committee investigating the Peoples Temple in which he described his brief inspection tour of the early stages of Jonestown. Krebs reported that the Americans and the local Guyanese laborers they hired toiled to build a town in the muddy, seemingly uninhabitable, jungle. He noted that the accommodations were primitive, that is, except for the new home of Mr. Muggs, of which he wrote,
...the comparatively sumptuous roofed cage in
which was housed a chimpanzee (or some kind of
primate), reportedly rescued from an unkind fate
with a circus or zoo in California and brought
to Guyana.[157]
The key words in the testimony are "reportedly rescued." Krebs, no doubt, received his information from a Temple worker who inadvertently perpetuated the lie regarding Muggs' former owner but who could only speculate on Jones' explanation that Muggs had been "grossly mistreated."
By 1977, when Jones and the balance of the Temple pioneers arrived in Guyana, there were several dogs living in Jonestown. These were the communal pets and watchdogs that provided an early warning system against the jaguars that frequently prowled the jungle community at night. On one occasion, Jones boasted to a visiting dignitary that he had invented a wheelchair-like device for three legged dogs. This would not have been the first time that Jones amputated an animal's leg as a publicity stunt.
In the final hour of Jonestown, with most of the residents lying dead in neat, orderly piles, Jones and his surviving guards were preparing to depart on their planned thirteen mile hike across the Venezuelan border when they realized the dogs presented a hindrance to their escape as they would undoubtedly follow the group into Venezuela rather than remain with the nine hundred dead in Jonestown. Jones ordered the dogs assembled and shot. Also, in a symbolic move, he ordered that Mr. Muggs receive a dosage of cyanide. Muggs died in his cage, as did the other guinea pigs in the experiment. The killing of Mr. Muggs and the Jonestown dogs has been reported as evidence that the crazed Bishop Jones wanted to destroy all life in his jungle community, but such was not the case as the community's collection of exotic birds was spared. Days later, when the first outsiders arrived to survey they found the birds resting on their perches like silent sentinels above the carnage.
Dogs and monkeys; throughout his career, Jones used and abused them to achieve his desired results. It is essential to fully understand his inhumane treatment of these animals for it was with this same ruthless brutality that Jim Jones treated people.
The public life of Jim Jones began, progressed and ended with his manipulation of dogs and monkeys. Throughout his career, Jones surrounded himself with a variety of animals. These were the pet mascots for his preliminary experiments in behaviour modification that helped him to develop his tremendous power to manipulate people. Over the years, these animals provided their master with money, recruits, favorable publicity and security guards for his Peoples Temple. They helped maintain the fallacy that Jones was a humanitarian who suffered constant attacks from racist enemies. In the final analysis, the Temple's animals provide an insight into the mind of Jim Jones. Perhaps the most accurate accounting of the Reverend Jim Jones comes from viewing his career through the eyes of dogs and monkeys.
The first congregation of the child preacher's "pretend church" was comprised of several stray dogs that young Jim had adopted. His canine congregation followed the Bible-toting boy everywhere he went and sat patiently whenever he practiced preaching to them.
Jones' pretend church grew to include the other children in his neighborhood but it remained oriented towards animals as Jim's primary function was to conduct funeral services for his playmates' deceased pets. Judging from his later treatment of animals, it is highly possible that young Jim murdered the pets just for the opportunity to officiate at the funerals. Jim Jones learned at an early age that a dead animal could give him power over people.
Years later, in an effort to finance his Peoples Temple, Jones embarked on the most absurd fund-raising campaign in religious history. He sold live Rhesus monkeys door-to-door. According to an interview published in the Indianapolis News on December 5th, 1953, Jones got the idea from an unidentified South American student who promised that there was money to be made in the monkey business. His first acquisition was a pet chimpanzee that he trained in table manners and the use of the toilet. Jones named the chimp "Sugar." Sugar enjoyed all the privileges of the other members of the household but received most of the attention as Jones had began an intensive study in primate behaviour. Sugar would die of strychnine poisoning. By Jones' account, he then imported several dozen Rhesus monkeys from South America, Africa, Thailand and India, housed them in his garage and sold them, one at a time, for $29 each. The local Black residents must have been quite surprised to discover the young White preacher at their door with a Bible in one hand and a live monkey in the other. It was the Christmas season and Jones convinced many parents that a monkey would make an excellent present for their children. The unlikely combination of salvation, racial equality and monkeys was successful in raising funds while providing a foot-in-the-door to recruit new parishioners. It was also good publicity; at least for a while.
A front page article in the Indianapolis Star, dated April 10, 1954, heralded the death of Jones' monkey business. According to the report, Jones had abandoned a recent shipment in the customs warehouse in the Federal building in Indianapolis when he refused the air-freight bill. Of the seven monkeys in the crate, three had died in transit and the remaining four were very sick. Despite efforts by the customs officials to nurse the four back to health, only two survived to be sold at the unclaimed freight auction. Though the article tarnished the preacher's reputation, it did serve to disguise the true source of the monkeys.
It would have been impossible for Jones to have profited from the sale of imported monkeys at $29 each, the cost of the operation was too prohibitive. Aside from the normal business overhead, there was the high cost of international communications, the initial price of the monkeys, the expensive crating and air freight to Indianapolis, the high mortality loss in shipment, the required vaccinations against communicable cable disease and, of course, bananas, bananas and more bananas. Jones, whose business background which would later build an empire valued between $20 and $50 million, would never have sold at a loss. Indeed, he did sell several dozen Rhesus monkeys for $29 each but they had not been imported. Jones had acquired the monkeys from a domestic research laboratory where they were to be used as subjects in medical experiments. Fearing that his association with the research lab might prove embarassing, if not incriminating, Jones staged a media manipulation by ordering a token shipment, refusing to accept it and reporting his activities to the local newspaper.
The monkey business was bizarre but important as it established Jones' early interest in behavioural science and his covert association with a medical research laboratory that apparently was of sufficient size that the loss of several dozen lab animals went unnoticed. It also attests to his ability to manipulate the press, a skill he would later hone to perfection, as well as his devious, yet intelligent, planning, as this one project built the first Peoples Temple with money, parishioners, publicity and purpose as the first in many studies in behaviour modification. In retrospect, the monkey business had all the elements of sadistic irony that marked the Temple's future projects. Whenever Jones set the record wrong he provided posterity with a glimpse of his sick sense of humour. The fact that this son of a Ku Klux Klan officer bankrolled his self-destructive interracial church by selling monkeys to his prospective Black victims is, in itself, a racial slur. There is also strong symbolism in selling lab animals to finance a medical experiment that used "lab people." It was almost as if the experiments in behaviour modification had progressed to the point where Jones, or his superiors, said, "Out with the monkeys; in with the Blacks" and, with his talent for logical planning, Jones accomplished both goals in one step.
Once he completed the transition from selling monkeys to saving Blacks, Jones returned to murdering dogs in an attempt to control people. The Indianapolis Temple was full of new Black faces but Jones realized he needed to do something spectacular to keep their attention and ensure their return. He also knew that nothing could bind a group closer than the threat of a common enemy. Since their only common enemy was Jones, himself, he proceeded to invent a fictitious one. From the very beginning, Jones claimed that his doctrine of racial equality and Utopian socialism had made him a target for the racist Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party. According to Jones, he was constantly harassed by threatening phone calls and night riding vigilantes who vandalized his parsonage. He tried very hard to impress upon his predominantly Black congregation that he was somehow a champion for their cause.
Jones had converted his then defunct monkey house into an animal shelter where he fed and found homes for stray dogs, one in particular. He brought the dog to church services and introduced it to the congregation as a wayward stray that he had compassionately adopted as his personal pet. The following Sunday morning, the congregation arrived at the Temple to discover that the building had been vandalized during the night. There was garbage spread on the front steps and swastikas painted in red on the doors. Over the entrance were written the words, "Nigger Lover." The faithful ascended the steps, passed the garbage, and into the door marked "Nigger." In the vestibule they had to side-step the corpse of their preacher's "pet dog." Its throat had been slit and the body had obviously been thrown through a nearby broken window. There was a large puddle of blood on the floor and, for the first time, the parishioners realized that the warnings on the church facade had been painted in dog's blood. They proceeded to take their places inside with the uneasy silence of a wake. When everyone was assembled, Jones made his entrance.
The air was electrified with anticipation as he walked stiff, tight-lipped and determined to the pulpit. He paused long enough to make eye contact with each of his followers and then, in the loudest voice he could muster, he screamed, "Nigger Lover! Nigger Lover! You better believe I'm a nigger lover!" The audience roared in wild applause, spurred on by White provocateurs positioned throughout the crowd. Pent up emotions from years of discriminatory treatment were released and focused on this one dramatic incident. The scheme succeeded, not only in drawing the congregation closer to Jones, but in spreading the word to other Blacks that the young White preacher was a champion of their cause. Blacks flocked to the Peoples Temple as a sanctuary from the retribution of an enemy that they perceived as growing stronger with each passing day. It was amazing what Jones could accomplish with a dead dog, a broken window and a few cans of garbage.
When the Temple moved to California in 1965, Jones made the trip in the company of his family, his Black maid and a stray dog with her litter of puppies - - all in the same car. The dogs were important as, even before he established a permanent headquarters for the Temple, he opened another animal shelter. The Redwood Valley shelter introduced the Reverend Jones to the tiny Northern California community as a civic-minded "good Samaritan" and provided an endless supply of stray dogs for his use. Once the new Peoples Temple building was completed, unseen vigilantes again hurled dead dogs onto Temple property. This time, Jones blamed the Nazis and the John Birch Society, as the Ku Klux Klan was not active in Northern California. He used the incident as an excuse to tighten security at the church and to explain the high metal fence that was erected around the perimeter. The fence apparently did not deter the alleged enemies of the Temple as they simply threw the dead dogs over the gate and onto the front lawn. Barbed wire was added to the fence, a guard tower was built at the front gate, search lights were installed and sentries, with trained German Shepherds, twenty-four hours a patrolled the compound day. The Redwood Valley Temple evolved to look very much like a Nazi concentration camp and when anyone asked why, the answer boiled down to dead dogs.
Though the dead dog tactic was, once again, successful in achieving the desired results, it was a mistake for Jones to stage the deceit in California. This was a new Peoples Temple, 2,000 miles from the old one, with a new membership and, according to Jones, a new set of invisible enemies that, against all odds, employed the same tactics as his alleged enemies in Indianapolis. The use of dead dogs in Indiana as well Indianapolis. as in California provides posterity with an obvious clue that Jones, himself, had perpetuated all the deaths. Jones realized that most people are as appalled at the murder of a helpless dog as they are a the murder of a fellow human being. With his understanding of human nature, he was able to create martyrs for his cause without risking capital punishment. The penalty for killing a dog is, at worst, a sharp reprimand from the SPCA and a nominal fine from the courts, yet it was just as effective as the murder of a human advocate of the Peoples Temple.
All of the dogs in the Redwood Valley animal shelter were put to use. Temple aides would call on prospective recruits under the pretext of giving away free puppies from the shelter. Once inside the prospect's home, the conversation would change to a dissertation on the good works of Jim Jones and an invitation to attend the next services at the Temple. The technique was a variation on the monkey business in Indiana but this time the prospective recruits were mostly Native Americans as there were very few Blacks living in the Redwood Valley area. Jones would later look to the ghettoes of San Francisco and Oakland to complete the required number of Black parishioners. Temple aide Carolyn Layton provided a record of the puppy give-away program in a typed memorandum dated June 21, 1973, in which she described a recent housecall,
(basis of C (call) giving away puppies--Mrs. S--_________ wants a dog Melvina says.[155]
The older canines in the shelter, which were too large for the puppy program, were trained as attack dogs and released in the Temple's compound at night. Their presence was as effective at keeping parishioners inside the building as it was in keeping the alleged enemies out. When the Temple moved its headquarters from Redwood Valley to San Francisco, Jones ordered Jim McElvane and Jack Beam to shoot the thirty or so remaining dogs in the kennel and bury them in a large pit on Temple property because they had outlived their purpose.
In 1973, Jones acquired a new mascot for his Redwood Valley Temple, a young chimpanzee he named "Mr. Muggs." Mr. Muggs was introduced to the congregation in the first issue of the Temple Reporter, published late in the summer of 1973. According to Jeannie Mills, a member of the Temple's publication staff,
After thousands of papers had been printed and folded, Jim found a sentence that had to be deleted. We destroyed thousands of papers because of that one sentence. In an article about "Mr. Muggs," the chimpanzee that our church had adopted, the newspaper stated that Muggs had been saved from scientific experimentation. Jim was afraid that sentence (containing the word 'vivisection') might offend the scientific community, so we had to reprint the entire paper saying that Muggs had been "grossly mistreated."[156]
Jones was certainly not afraid of offending the scientific community in general as much as he was afraid of exposing the particular medical research laboratory that had given Mr. Muggs to him. For the second time in his career, he had gone to great lengths to suppress the identity of the benefactor of his monkeys. In all probability, Mr. Muggs came from the Berkeley laboratory of Dr. Lawrence Layton, the former chief of the Chemical Warfare Division, whose family played such a prominent role in the Peoples Temple and the experiment in Jonestown.
In addition to serving as the Temple's mascot and living testimony to Jones' humanitarian heart, Muggs provided another important service to the Redwood Valley compound. Muggs's huge outdoor cage was built near the entrance to the estate in order to camouflage the guard tower, searchlights and short wave radio antenna that were installed on its roof. To outside observers, who questioned the concentration camp setting, Temple members would respond that the unusual structure was not a guard tower but the home of Mr. Muggs, the chimpanzee that their beloved leader had rescued from a torturous existence at the hands of its former owner.
Sometime in 1974, Mr. Muggs was shipped from California to Jonestown with the advance party that cleared the jungle floor for cultivation. Following the carnage in 1978, Max Krebs, the U.S. Ambassador to Guyana from 1974 to 1976, provided a statement to the Congressional committee investigating the Peoples Temple in which he described his brief inspection tour of the early stages of Jonestown. Krebs reported that the Americans and the local Guyanese laborers they hired toiled to build a town in the muddy, seemingly uninhabitable, jungle. He noted that the accommodations were primitive, that is, except for the new home of Mr. Muggs, of which he wrote,
...the comparatively sumptuous roofed cage in
which was housed a chimpanzee (or some kind of
primate), reportedly rescued from an unkind fate
with a circus or zoo in California and brought
to Guyana.[157]
The key words in the testimony are "reportedly rescued." Krebs, no doubt, received his information from a Temple worker who inadvertently perpetuated the lie regarding Muggs' former owner but who could only speculate on Jones' explanation that Muggs had been "grossly mistreated."
By 1977, when Jones and the balance of the Temple pioneers arrived in Guyana, there were several dogs living in Jonestown. These were the communal pets and watchdogs that provided an early warning system against the jaguars that frequently prowled the jungle community at night. On one occasion, Jones boasted to a visiting dignitary that he had invented a wheelchair-like device for three legged dogs. This would not have been the first time that Jones amputated an animal's leg as a publicity stunt.
In the final hour of Jonestown, with most of the residents lying dead in neat, orderly piles, Jones and his surviving guards were preparing to depart on their planned thirteen mile hike across the Venezuelan border when they realized the dogs presented a hindrance to their escape as they would undoubtedly follow the group into Venezuela rather than remain with the nine hundred dead in Jonestown. Jones ordered the dogs assembled and shot. Also, in a symbolic move, he ordered that Mr. Muggs receive a dosage of cyanide. Muggs died in his cage, as did the other guinea pigs in the experiment. The killing of Mr. Muggs and the Jonestown dogs has been reported as evidence that the crazed Bishop Jones wanted to destroy all life in his jungle community, but such was not the case as the community's collection of exotic birds was spared. Days later, when the first outsiders arrived to survey they found the birds resting on their perches like silent sentinels above the carnage.
Dogs and monkeys; throughout his career, Jones used and abused them to achieve his desired results. It is essential to fully understand his inhumane treatment of these animals for it was with this same ruthless brutality that Jim Jones treated people.