When it comes to pets, few are more expensive than cute, doe-eyed, diapered infant monkeys that exotic animal dealers peddle over the Internet and through newspaper want ads from $1,800 to $25,000.
“They are sweet and they are fun, when they’re babies,” said April Truitt, owner of a Kentucky rescue center that takes in abandoned monkeys, “but it’s another story when they get to be adults and they start biting everybody in the house.
“That’s when people start calling us, sobbing into the phone, hoping and begging us to take the little buggers off their hands.”
Reacting to an unending string of bitten and injured owners bloodied by adopted monkeys, zoo officials and animal welfare activists went to Springfield Tuesday to campaign for more stringent controls on the pet monkey trade in the state. They met with overwhelming resistance, however, as the House Agriculture Committee for the second year in a row killed the measure.
The activists had sought an amendment to the state’s Dangerous Animal Act that would classify all non-human primates as dangerous animals.
“Pet monkeys have become both a public health concern and a safety concern,” Dr. David Bromwell, the state Department of Agriculture veterinarian, said before the hearing. “They are carriers of several threatening human diseases, including hepatitis. As they mature, they are not gentle, easily controlled animals. They can and they do bite people, often children.”
Opponents of the proposed legislation at the hearing, including pet shop owners and animal breeders, argued they would be put out of business by the amendment.
Most of the testimony for the amendment emphasized that primates, from spider monkeys to chimpanzees, are wild animals with dangerous and unpredictable behaviors.
“They should never be thought of as pets,” said Peter Bukowski, a chastened Chicago construction contractor who bought a 3-week-old male capuchin monkey, Oliver, from a dealer in Indiana five years ago.
Bukowski, who emigrated with his wife, Marzena, and daughter, Monika, from Poland 11 years ago, said he paid $3,000 for Oliver, to fulfill his wife’s dream, harbored since reading Pippi Longstocking stories as a girl, of owning a monkey.
Oliver was adorable, said Bukowski, but so miserable when left alone at night that Bukowski and his wife soon had him in diapers and in their bed.
The Bukowskis soon had to strip the room of any movable objects.
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“He would grab perfume bottles and empty them into his hands and rub all over himself,” said Bukowski. “We installed special locks on the dresser drawers, because he would open them up and fling the contents all over the room.”
It got worse.
“He would grab a sharp knife and run around with it, and the older he got, the less he listened when I commanded him to drop things,” said Bukowski. “Once he jumped on my daughter’s neck with a knife and was waving it about her face.”
Still, Oliver was a charmer.
“We have dogs and cats, and we love them,” said Bukowski, “but a monkey is something special. They look in your eyes with such intelligence, and they reach out and stroke your face with the palms of their beautiful little hands. We were so nuts about Oliver, we put up with the bad stuff.”
They did, at least, until he reached sexual maturity last summer. Then, on the deck of their vacation home in Wisconsin, he attacked Bukowski.
“He had grabbed a gallon of deck sealant, and when I told him to put it down, he leaped on me, biting my belly, making me bleed.
“Once he bit me the first time and saw me withdraw, then the violence skyrocketed. He contested everything I said or did, and any movement or look could spark an attack.”
Desperate, they called Brookfield Zoo’s primate experts to see if they could take Oliver.
The zoo gets dozens of such calls every year from owners of pet monkeys, said Melinda Pruitt-Jones, Brookfield’s primate curator. A mother called her last Friday, she said, begging her to take the family’s 6-year-old monkey, which had started biting her young children.
“Human-raised monkeys come to us unsocialized and maladjusted, and we can’t place them with our monkeys, so we just don’t take people’s pets,” she said.
With help from Truitt, Oliver finally was placed in a sanctuary in San Antonio.
Nobody knows how many primates are kept in the U.S. as pets in private homes, because virtually no laws regulate primate breeding and sales or set standards of keeping them. Pet monkeys are thought to number in the thousands nationally and at least in the hundreds in Illinois.
Chicago’s Animal Control Department gets roughly 10 calls per year from people asking to have a pet monkey removed from their home. Cook County gets a similar number of calls, while zoos get dozens of calls annually from people asking officials to take away loved but dangerous pets.
Pruitt-Jones, who went to Springfield with Brookfield Zoo Director George Rabb to join other animal experts in favoring the amendment, said the problem is that the trade in monkeys is very lucrative.
“This is a growing commercial trade,” she said, “where breeders pull newborns at 1 week old and put them on the market in newspapers and now nationwide on the Internet. They charge $3,000 to $4,000 for a spider monkey baby, $2,500 to $4,500 for a capuchin, $2,000 for a golden lion tamarin.
“A gibbon or a chimpanzee could go for as much as $50,000 or more. There are a lot of unfortunate things happening to people and to animals because of the money involved.”
The Illinois Dangerous Animal Act forbids people from keeping big cats like lions and tigers as pets, as well as bears, hyenas, wolves, coyotes and dangerous reptiles.
At hearings on the proposed legislation, monkey owner Robert Hoffmann, president of Animal Kingdom Inc. in Chicago, testified against the bill.
“In terms of a danger to the public, any responsible owner is like driving a car responsibly,” Hoffmann said. “I have a monkey, like I said, he goes literally to hundreds of schools and sees thousands of kids. And they’re all able to pet him and touch him while I’m there. I’m there to supervise. Would I leave him alone with the kids? Absolutely not. Because under those circumstances, as soon as the kids start to grab or try to do something they shouldn’t, he might nip. But as long as I’m there supervising, I watch the kids–I don’t let the kids yank his tail or do anything like that.”