Wow, I’m sorry your group has given up on this tactic. Changing the hearts and minds of kids is much easier than adults. I’ve given presentations on exotic pets myself, and I’m sure I’ve influenced many young people in a positive way.
I know of one local pretty disreputable private organization that presents a monkey during their animal shows, I believe she’s a macaque. Their presentation is complete bullshit, IMHO, because they don’t walk the talk - their presenter talks about how monkeys make terrible pets, all the while cuddling and stroking his pet monkey! The AZA’s primate Taxon Advisory Groups disallow accredited zoos from handling monkeys during educational presentation, which prevents this kind of double standard.
What does your group do in terms of lobbying? Do you think a complete ban of primate pets in the US is feasible? I know Florida’s private possession laws are pretty loose - are most of your intake from local owners?
Thanks again - the answers to these questions I found while working in the zoo field… are one of the reasons I no longer work in the zoo field!
How does feeding time work? Haphazard or fairly ritualized?
One of my co-workers relations had a pet chimp. And they gave him to a sanctuary after he ate someone’s finger. They came to visit him on his birthday, and brought him some cake…but did not bring any for the other chimps. Violating one of the cardinal rules they should have learned in Kindergarten (if you don’t have enough for everyone, then don’t bring any at all). Big mistake.
But to be fair, cafeteria disputes in human prison often do not end well either.
I used to work with elephants and hung out with orcas, and think mammals are all more or less the same emotionally. But when they can pull your arms off, best to be wary.
You’re not going to let the locals brainwash you into becoming a Gator fan, are you?
How about YouTube videos? Pick some individual primates with hard-luck backgrounds who blossomed once they started living at the sanctuary. I know a lot of people watch that stuff, but I don’t know how many are moved to donate. But maybe you could use the videos in presentations, too.
(snip) You would think that universities turning their monkeys over to us would be all too happy to contribute to the cost of care, but no, that actually happens very rarely. The vast majority of our funds come from individual donors. /QUOTE]
Thanks for your very informative and interesting response, Spice Weasel. Sounds like your sanctuary may need to consider charging an intake fee on those Universities. Your new endeavor sounds both challenging and rewarding. Best wishes.
There are a few things that the organization has given up on that I believe is worth further effort, and this is one of them. They have been very receptive to my ideas so far so I’ll say it’s on my long-term goal list to revisit this issue.
I agree, that is very hypocritical. Our standard MO when we do informational presentations is to show a short video we made and do Q&A. It would be a lot easier to sustain people’s attention if we brought the monkeys with us, but that would of course be antithetical to everything the organization stands for.
Our intake is really from all over the country. I don’t think we do any lobbying. That is another thing I think is worth looking in to. You have to be careful as a non-profit though. There are a lot of rules around lobbying and exactly what a nonprofit can and cannot do.
There are a lot of states that allow people to own pet monkeys, IIRC there are about 30 states without these laws. It seems to me that a primate ban would be feasible but I can only speculate, having no experience with lobbying myself. I doubt the monkey breeding trade has much political influence.
Well, they can use tools and come up with all sorts of ways to get into trouble. We have had monkeys start fires before. One recently figured out how to start them by applying bits of grass to a heat lamp. She does this because it entertains her (the lamp was removed.)
They are also pretty good at convincing you to let your guard down so they can snatch something away from you. Hats, cameras - in the case of the spider monkeys, the shirts off people’s backs - they look all cute to lure you closer to the cage and then - yoink!
They are pretty social, emotional animals, with very expressive faces. Facial expressions are key for communicating. They wiggle their eyebrows when they want to flirt with you. They argue with their companions and they spend a lot of time cuddling. I feel like I will be able to answer this question better when I have more experience observing their behavior.
The cutest thing they do, IMHO, is chirp with happiness when they see someone they love. It is the most adorable sound. When they all start chirping and chattering like that, it melts my heart.
The creepiest thing they do is bare their teeth when they’re happy. At first I thought it was a threat, because it looks like a threat, and those canines are huge. (Seriously, you do NOT want to get bitten by a monkey!) But no, apparently that’s just how they say ''What’s up?"
I’m still learning how to interpret all the sounds and facial expressions. It’s not very intuitive. For example, today we released some research monkeys into their new habitat (more on that later), and the way the habitats are designed, the monkeys can meet neighboring monkeys (though they can’t reach them.) So when one monkey approached his monkey neighbor, he made this weird hissing sound before screaming and running up close to the other monkey. To me this sounded and looked like aggression, but again, apparently they were just happy to see each other.
Probably the spider monkeys. They are very strong and have long arms, so you have to stay three feet away from their cages at all times. They all enjoy pulling hair, but those spider monkeys look like they could rip your scalp off. (The spider monkeys are also my favorite - they are really cool looking.)
The way the habitats are designed is rather innovative, there are runways between all the habitats with moveable metal forks, which enables the monkeys to be moved to any habitat without actually handling them or endangering staff and volunteers. They are very rarely handled directly. The only time I’ve ever seen that is when they monkeys are very sick and sedated. They seem to feel a greater sense of security sitting in someone’s lap when they are recovering from an illness or procedure.
(The habitats are actually pretty ingenious in their construction. They are so effective that we’ve consulted with other sanctuaries to teach them how to do it, and we have been used as instructional models by the USDA and FWC.)
I actually learned the answer to this from a staff member this morning. The capuchins are the most intelligent.
Extremely ritualized, like everything else around here. Every morning, like clockwork, the diets are prepared and distributed. Chop day (when all the food is prepared) is most of the day Saturday. Each monkey has a slot in their habitat’s runway that enables a tray of food to be placed there. I guess you would expect this place to be chaos, and in a way it is because there is always some monkey needing attention somewhere, but the organization of staff and volunteers is very structured and regimented. And everybody carries walky-talkies so everybody knows where everyone is and what’s going on at all times. Including me - I have one sitting on my desk even though I am not out in the field most of the time.
:eek:
Fortunately in the 15 years the sanctuary has been here (it used to be in Las Vegas), there has never been an escape. Well, let me qualify that. I think one did get out once, but it never left the property. I believe she was especially intelligent and they ended up modifying the habitat structure after that. The standard protocol in the event of a monkey escape is to lure it back into its habitat with its favorite food, which is pretty effective. As I understand it they are very social animals so they tend to just hang out where they live anyway.
Ugh. And I thought University of Michigan was obsessed with sports.
We have a lot of great pictures and video we share on Facebook. I actually have some video I shot today with my cell phone that I will share with ya’ll soon. Because my experience this morning releasing the lab monkeys was just too cool.
The title is provocative, but the presenter is someone who works with primates, and he presents some amazing video clips showing that, among other things, primates have a sense of fairness and will not hesitate to show their displeasure if they think they’re being screwed over. If you want to see just the specific fairness experiment, click here instead.
I know you said that few people touch the monkeys and you don’t have chimps, but I still want to ask if you or any of the employees are required to have any regular blood testing done. I say this because I once had a student job picking up lab waste at a UC. Occasionally I’d pick up a drum of waste formaldehyde from the Primate Center.
I was never near a monkey or chimp, but just going onto the premises triggered a safety protocol. I had to have a vial of blood taken and put into frozen storage twice a year. The idea, I was told, was that the monkeys could have a disease or parasite unknown to science and that the incubation time could be long.
With the blood in storage, if someone caught something exotic, they could identify it, then pull up the blood of past employees and test for the same thing. If they got a positive, they could track the employee down.
**Machine Elf **that is an awesome share. I look forward to checking it out.
As far as I know this is not done here. It wasn’t done with me, anyway. It sounds like a good safety precaution.
My understanding is that New World Primates are not known to have any diseases transmittable to humans. However, humans can give them diseases, so whenever someone is sick, however minor, that person is sent home immediately. Also, anybody who is near the spider monkeys is not allowed to go into Munchkin Land (where we keep the tamarins and squirrel monkeys) because spider monkeys can give diseases to them and the little ones have a very delicate constitution.
This is interesting reading. Thanks for starting this.
You mention challenges with outreach. Do you think there would be ways to perhaps open part of the facility to the public? We have a local wildlife sanctuary and it operates partly as a zoo. They have a number of animals for viewing that are former pets, along with injured/trouble animals that cannot be released into the wild. By being open to the public they have become part of the community, and that open-ness makes the community want to care about what is going on there. Knowing that the animals are being well-cared for is comfort to some supporters, but IMHO, more people become interested in your mission when they can see the animals themselves.
I appreciate your input, truly, and what you say is logical. But I don’t think that’s going to happen and here’s why. These aren’t just normal, well-adjusted monkeys. They are special needs monkeys, with everything from diabetes to cancer to amputated limbs, and most of them have psychological problems as a result of their treatment. Many of them are elderly. Opening them to the public would probably stress them out a lot. They get upset when too many people are bugging them. I agree it would be a lot easier to raise money, but I don’t think it would be good for the monkeys.
Does the organization have a publicly accessible website? I bet a site with pics + bios of the residents (why there’re with you, what horrors they might have suffered, how they have improved since moving to the sanctuary, etc.) might do a world of good without putting the critters through the stress of having IRL visitors. You can post videos, maybe even informational stuff teachers could use in their classrooms …
We do have a website with a lot of info on it, including pics and videos. The website is actually in the process of re-design courtesy of one of our volunteers and it’s going to be beautiful. Fortunately our photographer is verytalented.
Today’s experience was kind of amazing. We received seven new research monkeys from a major university, they’ve been staying in the clinic recovering from their vasectomies. Today we released them into their habitats, I volunteered to start my shift at 6:30am because they needed to be monitored. Watching them explore what is probably the largest space they have ever inhabited was really cool. They were so happy! So much chirping. They were a little confused and nervous at first, some of them leapt right onto the grass but others were not sure what to make of it and stuck to the tops of the habitat. They never saw grass before! Imagine.
I got to feed them watermelon and PBJ. The two I was monitoring were actually very social and calm and well-adjusted, I think overall they were treated well at the facility where they were kept.
I took video but the quality of the videos is not great. I’ll upload them to YouTube and then share them here.
