A monkey breeder reminisces
By Christine J. Camp

The Birth

A few years ago I was walking through the cages, looking at all the monkeys.....It was a bright day in south Florida. Birds chirped and butterflies flitted about.

I came to the section where I house macaques. I noticed a sudden silence and looked around for its cause. I saw nothing. The males in all the cages paced as if they were ready for a riot. I started to the northeast a bit to look at the snow macaques and a fight erupted. I felt as if the monkeys were trying to distract me. Then I saw the female snow macaque drop to the ground and lay still. It was so quiet. too quiet. I walked around and looked in all the cages, and every time I got close to the snow macaque cage, the female would drop to her stomach, the other female monkeys started fighting and the males paced.

This went on all day while I worked outside. I quit for the day. Passing the snow macaque cage again I noticed how the female seemed to be covering something....hiding something. But from me?

I sat at a picnic table 15 feet from the enclosure and stared. She lay as tightly to the concrete as she could. I could feel the stress from the primates. I could see it, smell it....but what was it?

I grabbed a metal mirror hanging from a Rhesus cage and sat back down at the picnic table, this time with my back to the group of snow monkeys. I watched them in the distorted reflection, watching me. Then I saw the female stop hugging the concrete get up slowly, cradeling a newborn infant in her arms. The others huddled around her, comforting her and trying to conceal her from me. I slowly put the mirror down and cried. She, and all the others were trying to hide the infant so I could not take it from them. What should have been such a joyful event was filled with terror and anxiety. I knew then that these monkeys had little love for me; they only tolerated me because I fed them. They loved each other deeply, but they could not trust me.

I went inside.

The following day I went out trying not to even glance in the snow macaques area. But I did see her from the corner of my eye....lay on top of the infant several times, trying to hide it. That evening I got my binoculars and sat far away and watched. I saw the group first. Grooming the baby.....comforting mom. Then I focused on the infant. It looked limp....pale, lifeless. I had no idea what was wrong, but I called my vet. When the monkeys saw him load the dart gun the wails could have been heard for a mile.

The baby had suffocated.

As my vet told me this on the phone after he examined the body at his office, I remembered a story I had read about a woman in a concentration camp who tried to keep her baby hidden and quiet, only to find that the child had suffocated.

Many times since then I've wondered if the snow macaque mother felt any sense of relief that her baby had died, to never suffer in human hands.