The Story of Clarissa Sue

By Kathy

I started my journey into having monkeys as pets about 10 years ago. I had a friend who owed me a blue and gold macaw and I went to pick it up. I came home that day with a two-week-old marmoset. She was so small she rode home in my shirt pocket. I named her Clarissa Sue and I thought all of my prayers for a baby had been answered. She was very small and very cute and needed my every waking minute and a few of my sleeping minutes. We were inseparable from the very start.

I seemed to know instinctively how to care for her. I got the baby formula, a bed and a caring case. You see Clarissa was a triplet and the smallest one so the Mom cast her off and my friend had raised her to this point. Clarissa moved into my hair and there she lived. We had quite a few adventures together like the day she got lose in my friend's store and I had to move displays to get her back, and the day she got lose in the yard and my sister and I looked like the Keystone Cops chasing her. Then there was the day she jumped into my salad at a restaurant. What a mess. But all in all the first year and a half was quite fun.

About the time Clarissa Sue was becoming mature I found a sanctuary that had about 130 abandoned marmosets and tamarins and I started to do volunteer work there. That is where my real learning started. It was also the time Clarissa Sue started to mature. As she matured she started to bite my friends and family. I always knocked it off as they did something wrong because she was not biting me. Then the day came that Clarissa bit me and not a light bite but and antibiotic needing bite. By the time this happened I was raising other parent abandoned babies and Clarissa was helping me. She was a very good foster Mom and did all she was supposed to do.

That is when I learned about instincts. What I did not know was that monkeys have not been bred domestically long enough to breed out their instincts so Clarissa Sue knew what to do and just did it. Her instincts also told her, her life was not what it should have been and this caused frustration and aggression.

I have been working with parent abandoned babies for 10 years now and my success rate is 95%. All of my babies are now successfully living with other monkeys and have very little if no human contact because anytime I have tried to handle them I have gotten hurt.

Make no mistake about it -- even a one pound monkey can cause a great deal of damage to any human fool enough to try and handle them. Clarissa and her sister double teamed me one day and almost got my eye and my juggler vein. I was lucky that day, I was fast enough to catch Clarissa Sue and deflect the bite from my eye, to my cheek, from her sister Annabelle Leigh.

I will never forget the last time I played with Clarissa Sue, and it still brings tears to my eyes. I was sitting in the safety room of her house and I let her come out to me and we played foot and tail. Our game of "I've got your foot, now I've got your tail." We use to play this for hours on end. We had just finished the game and I brought her up to give her a kiss and she bit my nose. I knew from that day to this that I would have to give up that part of my relationship with Clarissa Sue. She was lucky in that she has a great home with trees, sleeping and play areas and two playmates she loves spending time with. She is still living in my back yard and doing very well.

Clarissa Sue taught me not to mess with nature. I miss the relationship we had but I do so enjoy watching her grooming and playing like a monkey should. On a nice day it is a sight of joy to watch her and her sister laying in the sun grooming each other. I have my loom standing so I can look up while weaving and watch these wonderful monkeys playing, sharing and chasing each other.

Please remember to do the right thing by the monkey and yourself and leave the cute "pet" monkey where you found it. If everyone would stop buying "pet" monkeys then people would stop selling them, then they would quit catching them in the wild and then maybe we will still have our cute neighbors living free and wild as the Creator intended.

I hope my story of loss and pain can help you decide to leave the monkeys to the monkeys but if you still have doubts I will be happy to share more stories with you I have plenty.