Animal Chatter

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter recently from people who would like to have a monkey or chimp as a pet. They see them on TV and think how cute they are, or in the zoos they see them interacting with one another and its adorable, or that cute baby monkey you see. There is no denying, they are cute little creatures, but, they can also be deadly or quite difficult to handle.

The fact is most of the chimps or monkeys you see on TV are babies or adolescents. The reason being is that as they get older, they become more demanding and harder to control. We all know how intelligent they are, but did you know that they become 7 times as strong as a human being, so, literally, if they don’t want to do something, they aren’t going to do it. Biting and scratching is natural behavior for these pets and raising them in captivity will not eliminate that. Also, they require special diets, not just your local supermarket canned pet food.

Finding a place to keep the monkey or chimp in your house would be difficult too. By nature, they like to swing and jump and you would need a very large dedicated area to keep them in. Interaction with other primates is almost a necessity, however, if you raise them from being a baby, they will find it difficult to know exactly how to interact with other primates, which makes it difficult for those primates that are given to sanctuaries when they are older and the owner realizes that they can no longer control this once cute baby.

Disease is also another risk. Monkeys and Chimps do carry quite a number of fungal, bacterial and parasitic diseases. Herpes B, salmonella, monkey pox and tuberculosis are among them. Almost all of the macaque monkeys carry the deadly Herpes B virus, which can be transmitted to humans through bites and scratches. Approximately 90% of those infected get encephalomyelitis and 75% of those result in death. Humans can also transmit diseases to monkeys and chimps such as pox, meningitis and hepatitis.

It is illegal to import primates into the US for pet trade, however, in other countries, many of the primates that serve as pets are captured in the wild and because the thought of owning a cute pet monkey is still high, the demand for them is still great.