Mica

A elderly gringo couple, with too much fat and too little hair (including a complete lack of eyebrow hair on the female half of the couple, poorly concealed by light  brown pencil swipes) stopped by Paradise Gardens the other day. They also had thick southern accents. Initial impression: bleh typical expats of the variety I don’t care for. I know, I shouldn’t judge people by their looks but hey, I am honest, at least here. To their faces I was very nice. And that was just an initial impression and I would have changed it had they showed me any reason to. For a moment I thought they would. He told me “We’ve got a donation for you. If you’ll open the gate I’ll pull in, it’s in the back of the truck.” Well, awesome, I thought, and walked out to open the gates. Bananas was my first thought. Often  people have way more bananas than they can eat on their property. Or oranges or mangos or palm nuts. And we can use them, our animals eat 90 bananas a day. And loads of the other fruits as well, the bananas is just an easy stat.

I got to the truck and he lowered the gate back to reveal a kennel with a shit covered howler monkey in it. If you’ve ever had any look at central american monkeys they are very easily distinguishable. White faced capuchins have white faces. Howlers are all black and, well, they look different than capuchins. Some people say they’re scary cause the have these beards and they howl and bark. They look much more gentle than capuchins to me, maybe because they move slower and more gracefully. They also have very different teeth and longer limbs. Tamarins are tiny and multi colored and have angry, mean faces. Squirell monkeys are small and orange and have a funny head. Spider monkeys I have never actually seen wild but they are supposedly not like the others in that they have super long arms and legs. Well anyway, this couple said they had gotten the monkey from another expat couple in Colon. This couple told them they had a one year old female white-faced capuchin who they didn’t want. So the too-much-make-up, too-little-hair couple sent a taxi to Colon to pick it up. That was a year ago. They brought the howler to us today saying that they discovered it wasn’t actually a capuchin, it wasn’t a female and it was too expensive to feed. Did it take them a year to figure all these things out?

Well, actually, they didn’t even get it right after a year, it turns out the monkey is a female after all.

We brought her up to the cage Arjento had recently moved out of (by the way, Arjento loves his new place, even though he is next to the tamarins and they squeak at him and try and swipe his nose through the barrier). She didn’t want to get out of her kennel, she was terribly shy and seemed upset, she banged her head against the inside of her kennel. They hadn’t any blanket or food or toys in her kennel. Just her and her poop. I asked what they had been feeding her. Something called “monkey chow” apparently, that they had to bring in from Miami. Why not feed her what howlers would eat in the wild? Leaves, fruits, bugs? They hadn’t brought any  ”monkey chow” with them. So we had to add to the stress of moving the stress of a changing diet. Although we did give her a massive bowl of fruits, as well as a coconut and she ate it all. She ate as much as Monty and Billy eat in a day, and they are super active, she barely moved, only coming out of her kennel to poop three or four times. So she must have been hungry.

I asked about her living situation and they said she was tame (yeah, she just seemed terrified and hid from us, and the couple wouldn’t get near her, maybe because of her terrible shit smell) and that she had lived with capuchins previously, since they thought she was one (how how how!?). The poor girl, she was probably so confused, howlers are so gentle and capuchins so rough, she must have been totally out of her element.

Luckily on Friday she was taken to Allouatta where, after a quarantine to make sure she is healthy, she will be introduced to other howlers, both rescues and wild ones. And soon she will be totally free to eat leaves, climb, play, leave and come back, but also have a safe place to come to and get some food and protection or help if she needs it. When you see her you just think, how could people treat such an amazing animal so terribly? Buying and selling her because she is not what they thought or too expensive or whatever? She has so much expression in her face and movements and people that treat animals like that I can only imagine are terrible people and have little respect for anyone or anything. No love for anyone but themselves, if that. Hopefully they never had any children. Or if they did, hopefully their children were treated better than their pets, way way better. Ugghh, I see so many good things, good people doing good things here, like Jessica’s awesome birthday wish, and then people go and show me the terrible side of humans, like this.

Also, a totally different note: the dude at the top of the page (handsome, no?) is now traveling with me. His name is Matt. He is my brother. We are at a farm in Costa Rica, but hopefully will soon be able to visit Boquete and Allouatta. More on the farm and Costa Rica and the in-between adventure coming soon.