Quote:
Originally Posted by alessia55
IDK... something along the lines of
- the space the animal needs ("territory")
- how far the animal likes to travel daily in the wild
- sociability of the animal (if the animal lives with a group in the wild)
- social and mental needs (stimulation; intelligence, etc)
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Although I agree with you about not keeping monkey (or apes) as pets because of their social needs (and also because of the damage they can do when things go pear shaped), if the first two items in your list were part of the reason then none of us would be keeping monitors, either. Many of them have huge home ranges in the wild.
As for monkeys, I've seen the damage they can (and will) do when things don't go their way - the times when a lowered voice just doesn't cut it. To say it's all the owners is to simplify it. It's not quite like disciplining a dog as the monkeys themselves have a fair bit more say in it and can decide to be bad. Yes, they may hang their head in shame when they do something wrong, but sometimes they do the 'something wrong' first and that may or may not involve biting someone, by which stage the head hanging in shame is all a bit too late. I grew up in Canada at a time when monkeys were available in pet stores and knew a few people that kept them. I've seen how all of their keepers had to do certain things in a very certain way to avoid things going very bad very quickly. I've also worked with primates in zoos and have seen a number of species in the wild, in South America and in Indonesia, so I have a reasonable idea what they're like. In my opinion, having them available in the pet trade is wrong on several levels.
When I was a kid and into snakes my grandmother used to ask me why I loved keeping such horrible animals when I could keep something nice, like a monkey. Even back then I would smile and think "you have no idea". Later, when I was in my late teens and had a reasonable collection of animals I was offered a pig-tailed macaque for free. I refused, but passed it on to a friend who was into exotic mammals. It was trouble for him in the end, too.
A few years ago I was watching some wild long-tailed macaques dealing with tourists in Indonesia.
It all started off really cute:
And then the unaware among the tourists started doing the wrong things with the cute little monkeys (surely they wouldn't do anything bad, right?) and started getting bitten. One woman got bitten because two monkeys took an interest in the sequins on her clothing and she tried to remove one of the monkeys from her head, another guy got bitten because he was busy watching monkeys come down the hand-rail of a bridge and leaned over to the other side to give them room, not realising there were other monkeys coming down the other hand rail. They wanted more room. A really nice couple tried buying a small bunch of bananas to feed the monkeys and managed to carry them for a whole four paces before they were set upon by a troop and had all of their bananas forcibly removed in seconds, along with a pair of sunglasses.
Sometimes all it takes to provoke an attack is too much attention. Like many other mammals, monkeys perceive a direct stare as a threat and react accordingly. This mother monkey was doing something cute and I made the mistake of paying a little too much attention to her with my camera. I had to avert my gaze immediately after taking this shot, to avoid an attack. I'd have loved to have photographed one of the males doing this, as their canine teeth were impressive and probably would have conveyed the message better.
As for apes, don't get me started on them. I worked with chimpanzees for a while (at the time, I think it was the largest colony of adults kept together in captivity in the world). I love them and was blown away by their intelligence and resourcefulness, but I also think they are probably the most dangerous animal in any zoo. At that particular zoo, if you were to ask any keeper which animals they most feared being locked in an enclosure with, the answer would almost invariably have been "the chimpanzees". There's a reason that in the old Tarzan television series his companion 'Cheetah the chimpanzee' was replaced every time he hit five years of age.
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