Life in a small cage – The experience of a caged keeper
24 hours confined to raise funds for marmoset rescue and awareness about the primate pet trade
4 April 2016
8.15am
I am settling in to my 3x4x6 cage. I’ve got a few books; my laptop; some cushions and a quilt… and plenty of time. Nine colleagues have preceded me, each spending their 24-hour stint in this tiny enclosure; it’s the cage in which our friend Joey, the capuchin monkey, spent nine years of his life, with tragic results.
To be honest, I’ve sort of been looking forward to this. 24 hours with nothing to do but laze around, be fed by my colleagues, read, and nap. To me, this looks set to be 24 hours well-spent. But I must admit, it’s cramped, and lonely, and I am only just settling in. I can hear the sounds of my colleagues outside beyond the door to the room in which my cage is placed, and I wonder what it is they are up to, but have no way of knowing. It’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to be as comfortable as I’d hoped!
I know very well that what I am doing will not even give me a taste of what so many pet monkeys live with for years, sometimes even for decades. They’re not all kept in cages as small as this one is relative to my size, but many are kept in enclosures that might be about the size of a garden shed; perhaps the size my living room is to me relative to the size of their bodies. So they can move around a bit; there’s the opportunity to walk or even briefly run from one end of the shed to the other, and perhaps a rope or beam that they can climb up on. But that’s it.
In the wild, different types of monkeys have quite different ranging patterns. Some will travel half a mile in a day, but many will travel many miles every day, exploring and patrolling their vast territories in search of food and opportunity. Imagine being confined to your living room for even just a week. Sure, you might be warm, and you probably have somewhere comfortable to sit. Someone will bring you food a few times a day. But is that enough? What sorts of opportunities await you in the not-so-distant corners of that room? You may feel like you want to move around, and you certainly could do a little jog from the door to the window and back, over and over again (although there is no possibility of this in the cage I presently inhabit!). But it’s far from likely that this will be enough to keep you either physically or psychologically healthy for long. Welcome to the life of a pet monkey.
10.00am
The day’s visitors will soon start to arrive at our Sanctuary.
The cage that my colleagues and I are being locked in is in a room on the grounds of Wild Futures’ Monkey Sanctuary in Cornwall. The Sanctuary has been here since 1964 when its founder Leonard Williams brought a group of woolly monkeys here in order to allow them to live far more natural lives than had been previously available to them. They were given their own extensive territories, were able to establish their own hierarchies, and their own ways of being were given great respect and consideration. Len’s way of managing the monkeys in his care is fairly standard today, but at the time it was truly innovative and he made great strides in improving the welfare of captive primates and in understanding woolly monkeys in particular.
Thankfully, woollies no longer appear in the UK pet trade. Unfortunately, however, many other monkey species do and we have estimated that there are thousands of them here today. Since 2001, the Sanctuary has focused primarily on capuchin monkeys. Even more prevalent in the trade than capuchins are small monkeys like marmosets and tamarins. While theoretically (though often not in practice) people need to be licensed to keep capuchins and so it’s possible to know something of some of their whereabouts, and the conditions in which they are kept, no permission at all is needed to keep a marmoset or a tamarin. This means, in practice, that owners of such monkeys are entirely unregulated in the ways that they keep them. When their whereabouts are discovered, it’s often too late; these monkeys have suffered immensely at the hands of people who simply did not know what they were doing, and did not see the damage they were causing. In recent years we’ve seen marmosets in bird cages; marmosets being brought into pubs and crowded city centres; marmosets suffering from such serious nutritional deficiencies that they’ve had to be euthanised. We’re told that there are “good” keepers out there, but we have yet to see evidence of this. If they are out there, I appeal to them to understand that in fighting to ensure that they are able to carry on with their “hobby”, they are also ensuring that an untold number of ignorant, well-meaning people are able to continue causing this type of suffering and there is nothing effective in place to stop them. But just as importantly, how is it possible for a private individual to provide a marmoset, or any other type of primate, with a social and physical environment that truly meets its innate needs? Primates are not domesticated animals. They have not evolved for thousands of years alongside us, to the extent that their “natural” habitat can arguably be said to be alongside human beings. They’ve had the chance; humans have been trying to keep them as pets for thousands of years. Some scientists who study domestication argue that in order to evolve into domesticated species, there must be “pre-adaptations” for domestication: a tolerance for human presence; some sort of benefit gained by close proximity with humans. Monkeys have rarely benefitted from proximity to humans. In fact, human encroachment and interference is likely to be the death-knell for many primate species that are critically endangered today. What is “good” for a marmoset is not a bigger cage; it’s not a loving owner; it’s not the best marmoset jelly that money can buy. It’s to be left alone in its own habitat, it is to do marmoset things in marmoset ways in marmoset places. It’s for us to leave them alone, not to buy, sell trade or collect them as though they were cars or works of art.
But, it seems, a good number of people aren’t leaving them alone. There is no way to get a really accurate count but the evidence we do have suggests that there are thousands of pet marmosets out there today. Wild Futures is working hard, along with a number of other organizations, to introduce legislation that simply and straightforwardly prohibits the keeping of any primate as a pet. Meanwhile, there is a great need for rescue facilities for these monkeys; most everywhere that currently has such facilities is full. The Sanctuary will soon start building such facilities in order to help alleviate at least some of the suffering that the trade in marmosets as pets has caused.
4.50pm
The visitors are gone for the day. Though comfortable, I’ve had no choice but to sit in slight variations of the same position all day, apart from brief stints of standing. I’ve had thousands of conversations with visitors over the years about what it must be like to be confined to a small cage, and imagined that boredom and lack of space for exercise would be the main issues. The last few hours have confirmed this idea, but even in such a short time two other things have become apparent. For one, my position on the floor here gives me a sense of being quite small, and when visitors come over to talk to me and loom over me, even with friendly intent, it’s easy to see how that would be very, very threatening. And more than this, there is the lack of control or predictability. Around midday, I started to get hungry; my colleagues had promised me earlier that they’d bring me some lunch, but I had no way of knowing when they’d come (or if they’d forget). By half-past one I was starting to feel genuinely stressed about it. A colleague came with soup very soon after, and anyway, a few extra hours without food would not have hurt me… Of course, in reality, if it came down to it, I could easily have let myself out and gone to get some food for myself! But the stress that came with even this taste of unpredictability and (sort of) total dependence was unpleasant, and it was telling. Less than six hours here gave me a hint of this; nine years? Few of us are likely to be able to fully imagine what it was like for Joey on that front.
5.30pm
I’ve had to take a little foray out of my cage. One of our elderly resident woolly monkeys, Ivor, is unwell and needs some veterinary attention this evening. There are several staff members on hand to do the job so I’ve come back up here to resume my 24 hour lock-in. Here is another reason that people just should not be trying to keep monkeys in their homes. I once heard an advocate of the exotic pet industry say that some monkeys are “easier” to keep than are dogs or cats. I suppose that depends on what your criteria are; if you are concerned only with feeding and watering, then perhaps so, because beyond a certain age monkeys tend to stay in their cages and don’t get taken on walks, and they don’t cause trouble by using your neighbour’s garden as a toilet or terrorizing the local wildlife (unless they escape). But to look after a monkey’s well-being – their physical and psychological health; their social and behavioural health – in order to do this well you need to have a deep and thorough understanding of their physical functioning, their psychological processes, and their normal behaviour, both social and otherwise. They need skilled 24 hour care, in addition to extensive and complex enclosures and well-balanced social groups. And even this isn’t enough. I’ve worked with hundreds of monkeys in five different countries since 1999, and have observed them in many other settings and contexts, from small, inadequate cages to the wilds of the Peruvian cloud forests and the Atlas Mountains of Morocco (I never choose nice flat places to go see them in the wild…). Here, at Wild Futures’ Monkey Sanctuary, monkeys are offered amongst the best environments and the most consistent care that I have seen in any captive facility. But it is not enough. Some monkey species fare better in captivity than others, but when it comes down to it, even here, they are ultimately missing out on something entirely fundamental. Sitting here in this tiny cage is not representative of our monkeys’ experience once they have come to live with us, but for them there is still this limitation, this boundary that does not exist when you make your own choices, when you choose your own location and path. When you are exposed to danger, but on your own terms, within your own freedom. Monkeys never evolved to live closely by our sides; they need to be caged when we keep them. This is telling. Monkeys belong in the wild, and only there can they really thrive, even amongst the dangers and shortages that natural life brings.
And yet I am in this cage to raise funds for the construction of cages… There are those who would call me hypocritical for this. There are those who rail against the campaign work that Wild Futures has carried out over the last 15 years and beyond. “You are trying to stop people from doing something that you yourself do, and it isn’t fair or right!” I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to place myself in these people’s heads, to understand whether they are truly missing the obvious or whether they are being disingenuous about it all. Probably a combination of both; cognitive dissonance means that a person unconsciously but stubbornly refuses to put two and two together in order to see the picture clearly. Instead, they cobble together partial truths, ignore what is uncomfortable and invent the rest in order to paint a picture that does not clash with their image of themselves as compassionate, good people. We keep monkeys in cages out of necessity. When people stop keeping monkeys in their homes (in cages or out of them), then we will no longer need to pick up the messes they leave behind. We can’t release these monkeys into the wild; it’s unfeasible for too many reasons. We can’t allow these monkeys to breed; monkeys who have been hand-reared by humans are unlikely to know how to look after their offspring. We often have no information about potential interrelatedness amongst our rescues. To allow breeding would quickly fill every valuable space at our Sanctuary. And we’d be adding to the number of monkeys in captivity instead of helping to reduce it.
We do our best at providing the monkeys who come to live with us with the best quality of life possible; in every case we see new life, a new spark in those crushed rescued beings who were certainly “well-loved” by their owners, but for whom all that love was not of much worth when it meant they were deprived of their families and the opportunities that all monkeys need in order to thrive. Even sick, elderly monkeys who come to live out their few last days with us benefit from things that they’ve never had access to before: grooming partners; fresh foliage; fresh air and vast amounts of space. We keep monkeys in cages. We wish we did not have to. But as long as there are monkeys to rescue, then that’s what we will have to do.
8.30pm
It’s earlier than my normal bedtime, but I am going to turn in for the night. I have my books and I have my computer, but I’ve seen enough of them for the day. Surely the night will be an adventure of sorts (as an insomniac under the best of conditions, a deep sound sleep is probably not on the books for tonight)… I’ve only done half of my time in this cage but it already feels like more than enough.
Perhaps I will sleep well, and perhaps, like Joey, I will dream of the leafy jungles and dense forests that I have left behind in another, distant life…