I THOUGHT at first that the muscular little monkey was simply trying to shake the rain off the wire of his enclosure. It was a February dawn in Cornwall, after all; a trifle cold and very damp. Then I realised that he was shaking the mesh and leaping from branch to rope in order to challenge me. This was the Monkey Sanctuary, exclusively for woolly monkeys, and this was his territory.
He, as I later discovered, was Charlie, the leader of the 20 animals in the colony; and adult male woolly monkeys take their protective duties very seriously. He did not look directly at me, though, which is what made his gesturing ambiguous. Woolly monkeys look at their opponents only when they really want to fight. This was just for demonstration purposes: ‘I am Charlie and I belong here, and you don’t’
Leonard Williams, guitar-player and teacher, founded the Monkey Sanctuary near Looe in 1964, with a ragbag of woolly monkeys that had been pets and photographers’ gimmicks. It seems incredible that as late as the 1960s, anyone who wanted to could simply pluck such animals from the forests in South America, pack the babies into crates, and ship them off. Yet the trade in pet monkeys was flourishing then, and woolly monkeys, innately sociable and intelligent, were in the greatest demand. The trade is banned now. Woolly monkeys are classed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as ‘vulnerable’ in the wild; and the Brazilian government has stopped the export of its animals.
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Most of the woolly monkeys imported in the past as pets led celibate lives, then died; adult males were often bundled off to zoos because they can be dangerous. In zoos, the monkeys were often stuck in pairs, but only occasionally produced offspring, which they seldom managed to rear. But Williams’s monkeys, at first given the freedom of his Cornish farmhouse, linked to wire enclosures outside, bred almost from the beginning. Now the colony is well into its fourth generation, and its territory is being expanded again, with the construction of the biggest enclosure to date, 24 metres X 14 X 8, linked to the rest by runways. Len Williams died in July 1987. June, his widow, now runs the sanctuary. She, and Rachel Hevesi, the head keeper, feel that after this expansion, the colony will have to be split, mainly – in the long term – to increase numbers in the interests of conservation; but also to accommodate the kingly ambitions of up-and-coming males.
There are two obvious questions. First, how has the sanctuary been so successful with woolly monkeys, when others in the past failed so miserably? Secondly, it is now widely accepted that many species will be saved from extinction in the short term only by captive breeding. What lessons are there in the sanctuary that breeders can apply more generally?
The broad answer to the first question is that the sanctuary seems to vindicate Len Williams’s philosophy absolutely. If you look at what happens now, you can almost tick off the points of good husbandry: the animals live as they would in the wild, as a coherent social group; they have space; they are in control of their own lives, and can choose what to do at any one time, who to associate with, and who to avoid; and they are well fed, well cared for and have plenty of exercise. Furthermore, the monkeys have a close relationship with their keepers; not simply with Hevesi, but with no fewer than 10 resident keepers, plus, at any one time, about five more transient helpers. This relationship is not one of owner and pet, but of what Williams called ‘friendship’. Such relationships between species are not unnatural. In the wild, young woolly monkeys sometimes associate with young spider monkeys; and Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees at Gombe, in Tanzania, associated with her and with young baboons.
What is most important to the monkeys in the sanctuary is that they are a group, not a collection. Primates are inveterately social, and build their lives around each other. Take that away, and the animals are permanently disoriented, and may fail to learn essential skills, including how to rear their young.
Charlie, as we have seen, is the number one monkey at the sanctuary. Django, his uncle, is number two . Sarah is a very popular female, now having some trouble with adolescent Ricky, who these days protests rather too long when she disciplines him. Bella is the only adult female without offspring. She is a good aunt, allowing the young ones to ride on her back, but she is very fat and her sterility clearly has hormonal origins.
There is, as seems universal among social animals, a dominance hierarchy. This is not based on sex, but on individual charisma, which in turn is influenced by size and age; but among woolly monkeys, all the adult males are dominant over all the females. In general, offspring retain a close relationship with their mothers throughout life, although as the males reach adulthood they rise above their mothers in the hierarchy. As the youngsters remain close to their mothers, they also get to know their younger brothers and sisters very well (they like to watch them being born), and close brother-sister relationships last throughout life. Brothers and sisters do not mate, however. Thus Charlie is very good friends with his sister Laura, but shows no interest in her when she is in oestrus. But fathers will mate with their daughters. Apparently they do not recognise the biological relationship.
Dominance and duty
The males do not seem to need to fight to establish their dominance. In the wild, young males have been seen to follow alpha males, ever more closely day by day, apparently wanting to join in all the adult activities. In the end, says Hevesi, ‘this pressure wears down the alpha’s resistance. Eventually he just gives up, and accepts the young one’s right to be around.’ Young males do this to adult females, too. Hevesi pointed out how Ivan made no detour around the feeding Laura. He simply brushed past. Soon Laura will simply accept that he has a right to walk wherever he wants. When the males have established their dominance, and are acknowledged as adults, they can afford to be polite again.
It may seem easy, being a male, with nothing to do but swagger. But the duties of males are onerous. They are responsible for the welfare of the group, and they may rush to its defence even when (one feels) they would rather not. In the early days, Len Williams tried to form a close friendship with a dominant male called Pepi. This was possible; adult males do form friendships with other adult males, even if they may be of another species. Williams made the mistake, however, of presuming upon that friendship. He would enter Pepi’s territory when the female was present. One day, he presumed even to turn his back on Pepi. This was too much. Pepi leapt on to Williams’s shoulders, gripping around his head, gouging at his eyes, and inflicting a deep gash on his head with his powerful canines. It is not foolish to suggest, as Williams did, that Pepi was leaping to the female’s defence; or, as he puts it, that the animal’s evolution, which demanded such an attack, fought against its upbringing, which should have imposed restraint.
Nowadays, when the keepers enter the monkeys’ sleeping quarters for the morning clean-out, they first call the two adult males to an outside enclosure. Otherwise, the males could well attack the keepers as they bend down to sweep through the wood-shavings. The females and young, however, remain as the cleaning goes on. Even so, keepers are warned not to get too close to each other in the monkeys’ presence, for this could be construed as a ganging-up.
Fights do break out in the colony; but on the whole, once the hierarchy is established, woolly monkeys are very peaceable. The alpha male sees it as part of his job to keep the peace. He will allow family squabbles to sort themselves out, but if they go on for too long, or if a subordinate animal is too assertive, then the alpha sorts things out. He may administer punishment (often gripping the nape of the neck), but always in the curious, detached manner of woolly monkeys, avoiding eye contact; showing, like some old-fashioned headmaster, that he is not motivated by mere vindictiveness. Adult males are good fathers and uncles. They establish social contact with the babies almost as soon as they are born, and as the young grow up, they ride on the adult males’ backs, and take appalling liberties with their tails.
The details of primate social structure vary from species to species, from group to group, and within the same group as time passes. As Jane Goodall showed with her Gombe chimps, and as is abundantly clear at Looe, the personality of individual animals varies enormously – some clever, some stupid, some generous, some selfish – and the personality matters: it influences the way the group is structured, and (in the wild) it greatly affects the group’s chances of survival.
Because individual personality and personal history are so important, a social group cannot be created just by dumping animals together. It must evolve, over generations. ‘You must build the territory around the animals,’ says Hevesi. ‘You must observe them constantly, and see what each of them wants, and adjust accordingly. We make changes all the time.’
For example, all the animals in the colony must observe the protocols in their dealings with all the others. It is important, then, that the territory contains no places where any individual might inadvertently feel cornered by another. When the animals pass each other, there should be alternative routes, so that each can avoid the other if it chooses.
This is where the keepers come in. There are an enormous number of them – at full staff, one keeper to every 1.25 monkeys – and they have power. ‘As we walk around we see what the monkeys need,’ says Hevesi. ‘If we see they could do with another rope, for whatever reason, we just put it up.’ In most zoos, keepers are not expected to be that involved. One keeper, Eric, came to the Monkey Sanctuary from a traditional American zoo; he learnt its ways, then returned to the US to introduce some of its ideas. He was told that if any monkeys wanted extra ropes, then these would be fixed by maintenance, after due authorisation from the curator. Eric is now back at Looe. Keeper power extends well beyond the fixing of ropes. The keepers have built the present enclosure, and converted the rooms in the house, and are now building the extension, albeit with professional engineering advice.
In the light of all this, it seems naive to ask June Williams why woolly monkeys did not breed well in zoos in the days before the sanctuary. In the old days, she says, traditional zoos simply put a male and a female together in a box. Both were appallingly deprived. The male had no colony to watch over, and no hierarchy to dominate. All his instincts for defence and command were aimed at the female. She, horribly bullied, would usually fret, and often die. If such a pair ever managed to produce offspring, it was because they just happened to get on well. If they did have a baby, and the mother reared it successfully, then the mother had probably been born in the wild, and had seen other mothers rearing their young. The males might also prove to be good fathers, even under those circumstances, because of the original, close relationship with the female. But it was all very much a matter of chance.
Leonard Williams perceived all this in the 1960s: that animals needed to live in natural groups; that they needed space and choice, if this was to happen; that their individual personalities must be taken into account. But he was not a professional zoologist. In those days, behaviourism ruled among animal psychologists; and behaviourism said that it was foolish (anthropomorphic) to consider that animals had thoughts or feelings. Psychologists should take into account only what was directly observable: that is, the fact that the animals behaved. Animals were properly regarded as machines. The basic mechanism of the animal-machine was the reflex, and the trigger for action was the ‘stimulus’; some external event, to which the machine carried out some automatic response. Any other view of animals was thought to be ‘unscientific’, and therefore nonsensical.
There was, and is, a fundamental philosophical flaw in the behaviourist argument. It is a reasonable strategy in science, and indeed usually necessary, to approach any complex problem by breaking it down into components that can be investigated. In order to get to grips with the enormous complexity of animal behaviour, then, it is reasonable to begin with the simple hypothesis that the animal is like an alarm clock. After all, alarm clocks are eminently comprehensible, and those animal qualities that do resemble alarm clocks can be measured and understood. But it was a huge mistake to confuse this working hypothesis with the truth. It is reasonable to say: ‘I choose to regard the animal as if it were an alarm clock, for the purposes of study’, but grotesque to say: ‘Because I choose to regard the animal as an alarm clock, and can explain some aspects of its behaviour in those terms, therefore it is an alarm clock.’ Despite this illogicality, that is precisely the reasoning that dominated animal psychology from the beginning of the century, until recent times.
In his books, Len Williams railed against behaviourism. It is a great pity, though, that he could not attend, for example, the meeting at the Royal Society in June 1984, on ‘Animal Intelligence’, in which speaker after speaker exposed the paucity of the old mechanistic view of animals. His own philosophy would fit very comfortably into the modern corpus. Is it really possible, though, to apply the lessons of the sanctuary more widely? Who else could afford to treat animals like this, with four keepers to every five monkeys?
Individual points of husbandry could undoubtedly travel. For example, Hevesi and her fellow keepers spend many hours collecting wild herbs, such as dandelions, sorrel, dock and willowherbs, and also branches from trees. Some of these – ash, hazel, elm, sweet chestnut, beech – the animals like to eat, for woolly monkeys are largely vegetarian. They like to catch insects, too, which is why they also favour sycamore, which is covered in them. Many other zoos do now recognise that a constant supply of branches provides hours of fun, not only for primates but for other creatures such as polar bears (which seem to prefer theirs flavoured with garlic).
The sanctuary has also solved the feeding problems that some other zoos have encountered. The monkeys are fed fruit and vegetables – lettuce, celery, spring onions, chives and carrots – and always more than they can eat. They pick out the best (which again gives them something to do) and leave the rest. They also receive a daily supplement of ‘monkey cake’, made with eggs and seeds. Youngsters receive a daily supplement of vitamin D3 and all the monkeys are exposed to a couple of hours of ultraviolet light in winter as they have their morning feed, to promote their own synthesis of vitamin D3. With all this, plus whatever insects they may catch they are free from all nutritional disorders.
Many other zoos traditionally offered a restricted diet, fearing that if they gave their animals more than they needed, they would overeat. Hevesi argues the opposite: that animals are likely to overeat unless they know that they will always have enough, and feel confident that they can leave some, without being hungry later. Once, she was called in to advise a zoo whose woolly monkeys had for many years been suffering from bloat; that is, they became distended with gas after meals. The zoo’s monkeys clearly loved fruit; but if their ration was increased, the bloat grew even worse. Hevesi recommended that in the short term, the animals should be given more vegetables – more than they could eat, so they were never hungry. After two days, the fruit allowance was increased as well. The monkeys now knew that they would never have to be hungry, and were happy to restrict their intake themselves. So, in two days, their chronic bloat problem cleared up.
June Williams doubts if all the principles of the sanctuary can be applied universally. She feels that its outstanding feature is the relationship that both the monkeys and the keepers establish with the 60 000 visitors who come each summer. All the visitors are given a brief introduction as they enter and are then shown around by the resident experts. ‘When we began the sanctuary, keepers in other zoos were more or less forbidden to talk to the visitors. Things are much better now, but there just aren’t enough to answer all the questions,’ she says.
For the climax, the visitors meet the monkeys face to face, and may even touch them, if a mother or her baby chooses to spring onto a lap. Such contact is in general forbidden under the Zoo Licensing Act of 1976, but the Act contains a clause (which was framed with the sanctuary in mind) to allow selected animals to be brought into contact with the public, at the keepers’ discretion. In practice, this means just a few of the females and their offspring. After infancy, no males may meet the public.
The Monkey Sanctuary, then, cannot serve as a model for all species, nor for all establishments. Neither is it the only valid model. It is remarkable, though; and it must now expand, as the flourishing colony outgrows even its new enclosure. The sanctuary is a vindication, in philosophy and practice, of the insights of Leonard Williams. He should be acknowledged, in captive breeding circles, as a kind of genius.
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THE STORY OF CHARLIE AND DJANGO
CHARLIE is now the number one in the Monkey Sanctuary; and Django, though older – in fact he is Charlie’s uncle – is content to play second fiddle. It is not Charlie’s strength or youth that brought this about, but his personality – that, and the support of the females, without whose acquiescence no woolly monkey male can hope to be boss.
Django was also the deputy to the group’s last alpha male, Danny; and when Danny died it was not immediately clear whether Django or Charlie would succeed. To observers such as head keeper Rachel Hevesi, it was clear that Charlie would eventually take over because he was cleverer and more responsive to the needs of the others. The nature of his takeover, though, came as a surprise.
Sarah had a new baby, Ricky. She was, and is, extremely popular, and Ricky was the first baby to be born for some years. All the other monkeys, including Django and Charlie, were anxious to make up to Sarah, and to be close to the baby. Sarah at that time had a particularly close relationship with Django, as they had grown up together, so everything seemed to be in his favour.
However, when Ricky was about two months old he decided to ride on Django’s back. Young woolly monkeys often do this, and the adult males generally take good care of them. But Django is unpredictable. When he had enough of Ricky, he did not coax him gently away, as adult males generally do. Instead, he panicked. Soon, he was leaping about and demonstrating. Sarah screamed at him, and he panicked more. The baby, by now, was clinging frantically to Django’s tail. Eventually he was thrown clear. He hit the ceiling and then the floor.
Sarah dived to pick up Ricky, and Django calmed down. He tried to appease her, but says Hevesi, ‘she was furious with him; and whenever he came near, she screamed at him.
‘Within half an hour we saw her with Charlie, and Charlie was making the most of it, making up to the baby, and grooming Sarah. Django was very much out of the picture. Two hours later, a fight broke out. Sarah and her mother Lulu – quite a powerful character – plus her children, all piled in on top of Django, together with Charlie. Django suffered only a few minor bites, and the fight lasted only a few seconds; as soon as he lay still, the others gave up.’
From that moment, Charlie was very definitely the leader.
Colin Tudge is writing a book on captive breeding called Last Animals at the Zoo to be published next year by Century Hutchinson.