There is a great article in the NY Times about keeping primates as pets. The interesting thing about the article is that there are no good stories about the animals. This encapsulates the process.
LOCAL and state regulations determine whether it’s legal to keep a primate pet, but April Truitt, the executive director of the Primate Rescue Center, a shelter outside Lexington, Ky., believes it’s never right.
A primate involves a much greater commitment than a cat or dog — or it should — because primates are social animals that cannot be left alone for long, and that live for decades: baboons for up to 45 years in captivity, chimps for 60 to 70. Once they have hit puberty, primates can become unpredictable and difficult to control. An adult chimp has seven times the strength of a man, Ms. Truitt says, but even a 24-pound monkey has the reflexes and agility to take down a man.
More fundamentally, Ms. Truitt believes, even the smallest monkeys are wild animals that do not belong in people’s homes.
But many prospective owners are badly informed, and, encountering adorable, docile baby primates with an eerie similarity to human infants, they find it difficult to resist.
Animal dealers, Ms. Truitt says, know that.
“The key to the trade is that these animals have to be removed at birth from the mother, put in diapers, put on a bottle and sold before they start depreciating — which they do, quicker than a Cadillac,” Ms. Truitt says. “By the age of 3, maybe 5 or 7, they reach adolescence and their hormones are telling them to do anything but take commands from humans. They are interested in dominating whatever social group they find themselves in. If it’s a human home, they often go after children first, then teenagers, then mom, and by the time they get to dad, we usually get the call.”
And it can get personal.
Chimps do, however, require some sacrifice. The family living room was given over to their cages, and after Mikey, the larger chimp, began bullying Louie, Ms. Harrison made her son give up his bedroom, just off the living room, to Mikey. Her son, relegated to a room in the basement, chose to live with his father instead.
“I didn’t think it was fair for the chimps not to be able to see each other,” Ms. Harrison explains. She starts crying and says, “I destroyed a lot of lives with what I’ve done.”
She also took a lot of hard knocks herself. In a New York hotel for a job with Mikey, Ms. Harrison was letting the chimp groom her teeth, which is to say, pick at them — a not uncommon chimp habit and an example, perhaps, of a chimp simianizing a human.
“All of a sudden I feel a severe pain on the right side of my mouth and then I felt something dripping down my face,” Ms. Harrison says. “And there was all this blood, and I look over at Mikey and here he had my tooth in his hand, roots and all. He had pulled my tooth out with one finger.”
You didn’t need that tooth anyway, right?
Mikey says, “You’ve got too many teeth.”