This presentation deals with the cultural and biosemiotic dimensions of human attitude towards captive apes and aims to uncover how these factors influence handling practices and human-ape relationship within zoological gardens. Zoological gardens are quintessential hybrid environments and as such they are places of interspecies interactions and mutual influences. These interactions are deeply shaped by human attitudes towards animals, whose roots can be found at the cultural and institutional levels (how particular animal species are culturally perceived and managed in zoos) and at a biosemiotic level (similarities between Umwelten). Individual level preferences should also be taken into account when analysing human attitudes towards captive animals, and these include education level, personal and professional history and emotional engagement. Personal life histories will be emphasised in order to offer a broader and more complex picture of the different variables that influence the interspecies relationships built in zoological gardens. Previous studies have suggested that keepers’ attitude towards animals has direct influences upon their handling style and, consequently, it has a direct impact on animals’ perception of keepers and other humans. This implies that keepers' negative attitudes towards animals translate in handling styles that can affect negatively animals’ perception of humans and in turn their welfare. For the purpose of the presentation, we will present a case study involving chimpanzees’ keepers at the Tallinn (Estonia) zoo. A series of surveys and interviews were conducted with the purpose of understanding how keepers’ attitude towards captive animals influences their handling practices. The presentation is a comparative case, as it takes into account the experiences of keepers working with other smaller primates hosted in the same zoo. The goal is to analyse the role of personification/depersonification of animals in zoo management and how personal life histories affect handling styles and human-animal relationship within zoological gardens.