These wome keep monkeys as their perpetual children, even when the monkeys bit their real children!
I don’t think monkeys make particularly good pets. The potential zoonoses alone should make one really think carefully before bringing a non-human primate into the home.
But to make one your ersatz child, that’s a somewhat–um– pathological.
And, as you’ll see, when the monkeys are bad, they call in the “monkey whisperer” to get them under control!
So they get an animal that was stated to be a biter and “not a good pet” and they are surprised it isn’t? Siegfried & Roy thought they could manage their tigers too. The *I can rehabilitate this animal* (even though *I* am not a behaviorist or skilled trainer) attitude isn’t unique to monkey owners. It’s common to the view that there are “no bad…..” — well, there are.
I’m not a fan of folk owning exotics. However, I’m even less a fan of someone deciding that it is not allowed because some people can’t engage their brains and manage the animals reasonably. You can probably find 1 – 10% of any given group that have gone overboard on whatever hobby / interest / (obsession?) they have. Consider the tanning mom who made the news not so long ago. Using these extremes to justify wholesale banning or restrictions is neither honest nor reasonable.
As a documentary – I noted the comment that altering the animal wasn’t natural (isn’t that what’s regularly advocated for dogs? It’s pretty much the norm for horses and cattle). How many is “many”? who do the things indicated? Is this 1% of the monkey owning public? 10%? 70%? I’m also not a fan of “pulling an infant” to socialize it — but that is regularly done in some birds as well. Even some zoos resort to humans rearing an animal if the real mother won’t. So it isn’t *always* a bad thing to do. Presenting it as if it was is misleading.
People shouldn’t own an animal they can’t control and which they don’t have a realistic understanding of. But then people ought not to drive cars recklessly, drive drunk, tan excessively, etc, etc.
These people are nuts
I’m categorically against keeping exotics as pets.
My god, Scotty, where do you find these things? These people are demented. Two kids, and a third on the way, and he gets a mature, male monkey. What the hell is wrong with his wife?
The man was a moron, and his wife was weak! That one woman who angrily corrected a group of people saying “He is NOT a pet, he is my forever companion” seemed downright crazy! I have only seen the first part, but I am sure I will have more comments when I have seen the rest.
It’s like a “documentary” on people with tattoos. They don’t generally cover the WWII vet with the anchor tattoo or the person with one small tatto on their ankle. They discuss the person who is covered head to toe. They don’t mention other than in short passing that tattoos have been around for a long long time (the “iceman” was tattooed), they focus on the dangers involved. Are the “monkey people” in this video series nuts? Sure they are. Are they representative of monkey owners? The video and documentation don’t say. I have a friend (PHD in human behavior) that has some monkeys — originally part of research. The monkeys are housed on a zoo level basis. I suspect that this individual is more represenative of monkey owners than what was shown in the videos. For one thing, the responsible person is hardly going to bring in viewers and ratings to the TV program. It’s like presuming “survivor” is an accurate view of what would happen in a real shipwreck situation.
Of all the people I have known who kept primates as pets, I can think of only one that really had a good, well-rounded, apparently happy life – a little squirrel monkey owned by one of my clients. .
What about the rest?