Adopt Monkeys
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Way to Adopt Monkeys
A 2008 ABC news special featured empty nesters who had decided to adopt monkeys in order to fill the void left by their absent grown children. The report focused on a baby capuchin monkey raised to live and eat with the boomer parents as if he were “one of the family.” Although an unusual news feature, this story points to a recent trend in the pet trade, monkeys being bred as pets.
This development marks yet another expansion of the ever-imaginative pet trade. Like the illegal parrot trade and the recent spike in interest for wild canine and feline species like Wolves and Bobcats, the monkey trade raises a series of questions about our relationship with the animal world. This evolution of the definition of what makes for a proper pet affects not only the particular animal involved, their wild brethren, and the adoptive parents, but also the wider community that will have to deal with the consequences of these individual decisions. What happens for example if the individuals grow too old to take care of the pet monkey? Do we deal with our closest relative in the animal kingdom in the same way as we would an abandoned cat or dog?
Is it ethical to adopt monkeys?
Often the argument by those who want to adopt monkeys and from those who are looking to profit from such a transaction is this. Because deforestation has endangered such monkeys, their extraction from their perilous environments will benefit individual monkeys even if it will have little effect on the fate of the species. Furthermore, the awareness raised by such an extraction the lot of such monkeys improves. The argument goes that if you did not extract such monkeys they would meet a bad end due to deforestation, so better to save them through adoption then to leave them to die.
The second version of this argument is that just by having pet monkeys everyone’s awareness of monkeys increases, and with it, their investment in monkey well-being.
The problem with such arguments, however are twofold. First extracting monkeys from their natural environments fails actually to address the destruction of these environments. Deforestation not only continues but those responsible have one more reason to argue that it is not such a bad thing. Second and even more important, such a notion fails to see the reality of the pet trade. Although at first monkeys are stolen from their environment, the pet trade soon resorts to breeders rather than natural extraction since breeding is far less expensive. Such breeders have already started to develop as these “entrepreneurs” try to get in on the ground floor of the monkey trade.
Animal Pouching
A further consequence of creating a monkey pet market is that you may also end up subsidizing illegal pouching of more and more exotic species of monkeys as the taste for more unusual breeds grows. This is what happened in the parrot trade in the 1980’s. The danger here is that already endangered species will have yet another factor with which to contend. Thus, when Americans decide to adopt monkeys they may be creating yet another negative environmental factor for their neighbors to the south.
Sponsorship Programs
If one really has a desire to take part in wholly positive outcomes for our closest relatives, there are several ways to virtually adopt monkeys while keeping them in their natural environment. These programs work much as those sponsorship programs you see for children in the third world. When you pledge a certain amount of money, say 10$ a month, you receive actual pictures of the monkey you are providing for. Many programs use your money to protect swaths of the rainforest that is your monkey’s natural environment. Some programs will even send you some “monkey art.”
The sponsorship model is the method that most truly respects your monkey’s own instincts and nature, rather than imposing our own selfish desires on the fate of our closest relatives. However, it also requires us to reach for our own best natures.