Life Lessons from a Spider Monkey

Kate Connell, UPenn

Foot In Mouth Disease, Winner

I’m sure that by this point in your life you’ve been told that our primate relatives down the phylogenetic tree are pretty damn smart. They use tools, work together to work out puzzles, and have demonstrated the ability to innovate. I’ll bet you can also figure out that smart animals in captivity are a pain in the ass to keep captive. They reckon that if you’re dumb enough to try to keep them in a cage (even if your intentions are noble, as mine were while I was working at a wildlife rehabilitation center), they will try to make your life a living hell.

            So let me set the scene for you: this is ARCAS, a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center buried in the steamy jungle of Guatemala. Most animals are brought in by the police in efforts to quell the illegal pet trade. The air is full of mosquitos, biting yellow flies, and the incessant screeching of scarlet macaws and roars of howler monkeys. You sleep in a screened in guest house, enjoy a drizzle of cold water for your afternoon shower, and eat a diet based around rice, beans, and tortillas. The other volunteers range from backpacking Europeans and vacationing Israelis to high school dropouts and PhD candidates. The permanent staff members are sturdy Guatemalan men who are quick to joke and constantly impress volunteers with their ability to lift really, really heavy stuff. Everyone is working their butt off from dawn until past the heat of the day to keep cages clean and feed the three hundred plus animals in the facility.

            Have a picture in mind? Great. Now introduce the spider monkeys. I like to think that they’re the element of chaos in this microuniverse. You might be having a miraculously uneventful day when suddenly you hear a distant explosion, and you think it’s those goddamn monkeys again. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But they did teach me some valuable lessons about the dangers of working with wildlife and other people. So I’ll share them with you, in hopes that you can prepare yourself for any Planet of the Apes scenario in the future.

 Lesson 1: Don’t trust stupid people. This one might be obvious to you already, but it might be slightly different in the context of monkeys. We had some particularly…how shall we say, “challenged?”… volunteers, who couldn’t seem to grasp the “don’t touch the animals” rule (AKA rule #1 at a rehabilitation center). Anyway, for the sake of anonymity they’ll remain Tweedledee and Tweedledumb. Tweedledee approached me on his first day, and said that he had lost his room keys. When I asked him where he thought they were, he mutely pointed to the spider monkey enclosure where our more aggressive monkeys were kept. Apparently he had been waving the keys at the monkeys when they grabbed his shirt through the chain link fence, rammed his face into the wire, and proceeded to steal his keys and sunglasses. We managed to get them back with a MacGyvered hook-on-stick tool. No harm done.

The next day, Tweedledumb decided to stay back in the spider monkey cage that he was cleaning after Tweedledee had turned off the water (a direct spray to the face will keep attacking monkeys at bay). So a few minutes later, we hear God-awful screams from the spider monkey cage, and Tweedledumb comes stumbling out with blood running down his arm. Turns out his private photoshoot with the monkeys didn’t go the way he had anticipated. He was fine in the end, but I did have to learn the Spanish word for stitches to call the vet for help (just for your future reference—it’s “suturas”). 

Lesson 2: Water is a precious resource. Again, this is a lesson that we’ve been taught from a very young age. I don’t think that spider monkeys were taught the same lesson.

We were working through a typical hot spell, and introducing a dozen new volunteers to the facility. When we were passing the sinks, someone tried to wash their hands and found that it wasn’t working. The well was filled by a pump to the lake, and every once in a while it ran dry and someone would have to go kick-start the generator. So no one thought anything of it until we came to the spider monkey enclosure. An obvious waterfall was gushing down the hallway, and we could hear the monkeys shrieking with delight. They had somehow broken the concrete slab and ripped the pipe out of the ground (I told you that smart animals would make your life a living hell, didn’t I?)

The staff went to work, and by the next day had repaired the pipe and poured a new concrete slab. About five minutes later, the water was out again. The monkeys had done it again. Wet concrete was slopped around the cage, and the new pipe was being used as a percussion instrument.

This vicious cycle lasted for three days. The house was full of twelve new volunteers. The showers didn’t run, the toilets didn’t flush, and we had three hundred plus animals to water and clean up after. It was an olfactoric journey that I don’t care to relive.

Lesson 3: Hold your machetes close. For enrichment, we would rearrange branches and add new swings for the monkeys to play on. On one of these days, the monkeys appeared to be behaving themselves (never be fooled!), and maybe we let down our guard a bit. We chatted as we shaped the branches to fit between the chain link fence. As we were jamming the branch into place, one of the workers shouted, “¡el mono tiene el macheeteeee!”

Sure enough, one of the monkeys was whirling a machete over his head like a goddamn baton. We sprinted out the cage door and watched in horror as the sharp blade was passed around, danced with, and tossed between monkeys. We were fortunate enough that they got bored, and eventually dropped the machete to the ground, and we recovered it with no limbs lost.

So there you have it. I spent three months in Guatemala, where I worked with crocodiles, avoided catching dengue, and regularly battled food poisoning. Of all of the risks, I still consider the spider monkeys to be the most dangerous. You might have gotten the idea that I don’t like them after all of these incidents. I don’t want you think that. Spider monkeys are delightful animals, but I prefer to see them in the wild, where they aren’t bored enough to become borderline psychopaths.