Apes CAN Be Taught Martial Arts – Charlie The Karate Chimp

A chimp learning martial arts might be something you would expect to hear 2 hours in to a Joe Rogan podcast after large amounts of alcohol were consumed. However, you may be surprised to learn that a man exists who did exactly this. He taught his pet chimpanzee how to do karate – and the results were pretty impressive.

The story begins with Carmen Presti – a man who lives in the Western area of New York. He adopted a chimpanzee named Charlie in 1985 after being shown a local listing by his wife. Presti was so impressed by the chimp that he remortgaged his mothers home in order to be able to afford the young ape.

Presti describes the chimp Charlie as “very easy to work with”, although explains that this becomes more difficult when the ape becomes older. This is due to both their temperament changing, but also because a 3-year old chimpanzee is already as strong as a human. After this, it becomes dangerous to do almost anything with chimps – let alone teach them martial arts.

In addition to this, Presti claims that within an hour he had already taught Charlie the chimp how to throw left and right punches, before teaching him various other techniques over time.

Perhaps most impressive is the jump spinning heel kick, which Charlie pulls off without breaking a sweat. This proves just how athletic and well-suited chimps are to fighting. Of course, a chimpanzee would never need to perform a spinning kick if it were fighting in the wild. Nonetheless, being able to do so on demand is very impressive. Humans need to train for a lot longer in order to perform such a technical and athletic kick.

Presti confirms the abilities of Charlie the chimp claimining “he actually learnt faster than almost any human I have ever taught”. Considering a chimpanzee cannot understand verbal instructions, this is quite incredible.

Unfortunately in later life Charlie was unable to train or live in the house of Presti since it would be too dangerous to do so. Sadly, Charlie the karate chimp died in 2003 aged 27 years old.