It’s been years since I’ve been to Monkey World and so naturally, the moment it closed down for the plague was the moment I really wanted to go again and at last I have.
First things first. Yes, Monkey World is a tourist attraction. No, it’s not a zoo. It’s not a safari park, a collection, a display or anything else. It’s a rescue centre and sanctuary that uses public visitors for funding. They’re important but they’re not its primary purpose. Monkey World isn’t for profit: every penny it makes goes towards either care and rehabilitation of the animals already living there or towards rescuing more animals and judging by the book Jeremy and Amy, it’s only ever one catastrophe from folding. So if you’re concerned about animal welfare, you can visit Monkey World with a very clear conscience. (That link to the book, by the way, is non-affiliate but it does go to Monkey World’s online gift shop so you’re supporting the rescue centre rather than Jeff Bezos if you buy it.)
Monkey World’s first residents who arrived just in time for opening in 1987, apart from the aforementioned Amy, were a group of chimpanzees rescued from a career in beach photography in Spain. To keep a reasonable-sized wild animal docile and cooperative, they were horrifically beaten, had their teeth smashed and/or were put on tranquilisers. Some of those chimps – Busta, Cindy, Micky, Beth, Jimmy and Sammy – are still there today. They have the best healthcare available, they live in carefully controlled social groups where they’re placed according to what’s best for each individual primate, they’re free to go outside or inside as they fancy, they can curl up under a blanket or throw handfuls of straw around or climb to the top of their apparatus or chase each other around or do anything they want. This is their retirement home. Over the last 34 years, they’ve been joined by plenty more rescued chimps and a lot of smaller monkeys, including 88 capuchins who were rescued from a lab in 2008. Well, the lab contacted Monkey World to tell them they had the monkeys and between having no further use for them and strong public opinion, they wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible. And of course, there are the orangutans.
I’ve mentioned Amy twice. She’s a founder member of Monkey World, alongside Jim Cronin and Jeremy Keeling. Jim and Alison get most of the credit but actually, it was really Jim and Jeremy who started it. Alison came along later and married Jim, who died of liver cancer in 2010. Jim and Jeremy both came from backgrounds in animal care, in various zoos and collections in the 70s and 80s. Amy was born into a private collection in 1983 and hand-raised by Jeremy almost as if she was a human baby. When the collection was closed and the animals sold on, Amy stayed with Jeremy and in Monkey World’s early days, she still lived in his house and was occasionally taken out around the park to meet the visitors. These days she lives with a group of orangutans, including her own son Gordon (who is himself now in his early 20s!) and evidently still makes cantankerous faces at Jeremy when he visits her, which I think is quite often. I don’t think he’s loved anyone like he loves Amy. But after spending her baby years as a human, he was keen that she should grow up to be a proper orangutan and not a pet.
The chimps are the star of the show. If you’ve seen Monkey Business or Monkey Life, the two documentary series on the park and its work, you’ll have seen ten times more of the chimps than you did of everyone else put together. They’re characters. A handful of them were born at Monkey World but they were accidents. Monkey World is of the opinion that every baby born there is a space lost that could have been home to a rescued animal and so most of the females are on various contraception – there are a couple of species they breed as part of international breeding programmes. Unfortunately, occasionally it fails. Chimps find the pills hiding in their food and spit them out, find implants and remove them, have accidents while the staff are looking for better alternatives and the good old fashioned “nothing is 100% effective”. But the intention is not to breed and judging by the website, there hasn’t been an accidental baby chimp since twins Thelma and Louise in 2013.
So I guess that’s the story of Monkey World. I really liked the orangutans. I remember baby Gordon from a visit or two when I was a teenager – he was a really cute bundle of orange fur back then and now he’s a fully-grown adult ape with huge cheek pads and a son of his own. There’s also a nursery. Captive orangutans frequently don’t make good parents because they just don’t know what to do with babies so a lot of the abandoned babies get sent here to grow up as orangutans in a social group of other young orangutans and they’re really cute. The entire group came out after lunch when I was there. Some of them sat on a rope in front of the goggle-eyed visitors, a couple of them went and climbed the tower, a couple of them swung one-handed from a rope, giving us a flash of blurry orange fur and when they got tired of being watched, they ran back inside. I saw Gordon and Amy and Hsiao-Lan – the two girls sat on top of a high platform and groomed each other while Gordon sat inside with his face pressed against the glass precisely where the glare meant you couldn’t actually take a photo of him and later went outside and climbed to the tallest pylons to survey his kingdom. The other adults mostly stayed inside, out of the drizzle but I saw a couple of them sitting outside hugging their knees and staring at passers-by.
Down at the bottom of the park I spent a while with Fox, a Mueller’s gibbon with a big white monobrow, and watched the stump-tailed macaques grooming each other. Because they’re celebrities, the chimps get most of the attention and that means the lower end is quite quiet. I really enjoyed the break from small children screaming “Monkey!!” at anything that moved, especially when the thing they were screaming at wasn’t a monkey. Not that I can talk: I only looked up the difference between a monkey and an ape the night before I went (in short, apes never have tails but monkeys mostly do. Apes have an appendix but monkeys don’t. Monkeys usually scurry around on all fours, apes are more able to walk on two legs. And finally, there are only a few apes. The lesser apes are 13 varieties of gibbons and siamangs and the great apes are 6 varieties of orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans. So in fact, all Monkey World’s biggest stars are actually apes and so am I.
Because the animals are so closely related to humans, they can catch human diseases, including COVID-19. So even though it’s not mandatory to wear a mask outdoors, Monkey World does ask you to in order to protect their inhabitants. Plenty of people think they’re above such petty things as not killing rescue animals and staff were pretty good at asking people to put their masks on or to pull them up so they actually cover their mouth and I am still enraged with the woman who spat “Some people are so sad and pathetic!” when her entire family was asked to cover their faces. Quite frankly, if you’re an antimasker, you shouldn’t be at Monkey World until it’s 100% safe again. Mask-wearing is as much part of the terms & conditions as not turning up with a sawn-off shotgun right now and if you don’t want to do it, stay at home.
I knew roughly what the enclosures look like from the TV. There’s always an indoor house, with fresh straw and blankets and toys and there’s a door to the outside enclosure that’s left open all day so they can come and go as they please. Monkey World does not lock the monkeys outside for the entertainment of visitors. They’re free to go back to bed or to find a dark corner whenever they want. The original plan was “a cageless park specialising in rescued primates” and when it first opened, it used fences to keep the visitors out of the enclosures but only electric fences to keep the chimps in them. At the time, it was revolutionary, almost as open and free as nature and certainly a lot better than the zoos of the time.
These days it looks like the electric fences are long gone, replaced by high wire fences with huge curved steel tubes are the top that are probably to make it impossible to climb over the top. The larger species have open tops, with huge climbing trees strung with mile upon mile of upcycled fire hose, which seems to make excellent rope swings and hammocks, being thick and rubbery and far harder to destroy than rope, with beams for swinging and walking and as ramps. The smaller ones do have wire roofs and I suspect it’s more for protection from raptors than being anti-escape. No buzzard is going to carry off a chimp, even a baby one, but it might take a squirrel monkey or capuchin. There are glass viewing boxes positioned around each enclosure so you can see the animals without the wire mesh in the way. I don’t know what kind of glass it was but when young Amy first moved in, she very quickly figured out how to break it, so I imagine most of the glass is ape-proof.
There’s room to play and to hide and to cause destruction and to search for food – they’re not fed straight from a trough or bowl, the food is scattered around so they have to forage a bit. Jeremy and his staff have always done that, since his private collection days. There’s a quote somewhere in Jeremy and Amy about how modern animals experts think they invented “enrichment” when keepers and carers have been doing it for decades but I can’t find it. The monkeys get to hunt for their food, they get puzzles to solve, they get fruit ice lollies in hot weather and pumpkins to play with and eat in autumn and they even get hot sugar-free fruit squash in winter.
I returned again and again to Gordon and Amy. The chimps are great but I’m more an orangutan person. I liked seeing Gordon tightroping with his hairy arms outspread right up in the treetops. I liked seeing the girls lying in a heap together, picking bits out of each others’ fur. I liked the shaggy orange hair. I am a polar bear and I’m currently claiming to be something of a house sparrow but I’m a bit on the orange side myself (I have lost count of the number of people who think I’m naturally ginger. I like being ginger but I’m naturally a sort of yellowy-mousy blonde, with more yellow when I swim more. Pool chlorine is just a very dilute bleach.) I took some nice photos of the chimps monkeying around and got a great close-up portrait of one of them but I just kept being drawn back to see what the orangutans were up to.
Yes, of course nature and real freedom would be better but it’s not possible. Very few of these animals have the skills they’d need to live as wild animals and they’d be back in the same dangers that got them here in the first place: adult animals bludgeoned to death so the babies can be sold into the pet trade, captured to go into labs, loss of habitat. A lot of the animals here have special needs. Chimps have long-term injuries from their days as photo props, they need special care and to live in an environment where, for example, their lack of teeth isn’t going to get them killed in a week like it would in the wild. The nursery orangtuns would never survive without human care and hand-feeding for the early parts of their lives. Do the 88 lab capuchins who lived in 18 inch cubed cages for years know how to live in a rainforest? And so Monkey World is a sanctuary, it’s a retirement home for primates who’ve had horrific lives. I daresay Monkey World’s eventual goal is to close down, with no more monkeys in need of being rescued, the current ones having lived out long happy peaceful lives. But it’s not going to happen, not yet.