Flying Feces

There are a lot of stereotypes associated with monkeys... besides the whole "ooh, ooh, ahh, ahh" deal.    There's the belief that they all swing from their tails, which isn't true.  There's their famed tendency for getting in trouble, which is true enough.  There's the passion for bananas, which I've never found to be more or less true than any other piece of produce.

There are also some less than pleasant stereotypes.  Foremost among them is flinging feces.  That one I've found to be, alas, somewhat true, if perhaps a bit of an exaggeration.

Various species of monkeys and apes are reported to fling their feces at predators when angered or upset.  Chimps and gorillas are especially famed for it - some individuals are known to their keepers for having quite the arms.  They're also known for having great memories for those who are upsetting them... say, the zoo vet. 

Other monkeys, in the zoo and in the wild, are known to climb directly above a predator and then let their bowels loose.  This is the only first hand experience I've had with this less than harming aspect of primate behavior.  I was training a new keeper on our spider monkeys, which we were working free contact at that facility.  I went in with our troop as I had every day for the past two years, the only difference being that this time, I had the new girl in tow.  The monkeys... objected.

I'm not quite sure what it was about her that freaked the troop out.  Heaven knows they didn't act like that towards me on my first day.  Whatever it was, they hated it.  They climbed straight to the top of the enclosure, the troop male positioning himself right above us.  I might have noticed earlier if we hadn't been so distracted by all of the screaming (none of which was a cute "ooh, ooh, aah, ahh." 

Anyway, our big boy (who, I must stress, was not my old buddy Bubba), let loose a brownish-green stream of slop over the both of us - right in our hair.

I'd never been so impressed with a new keeper for coming back to the work the next day as I was with her.

A major part of the appeal for visitors is how human-like monkeys can seem.  That extends to their waste.  I personally find human feces to be far grosser than those of other animals.  Monkey poop, not surprisingly, grosses me out more than that of a lion or rhino. Thankfully, occurrences like that have proven super rare in my zoo career, and I've never had an incident of a visitor having poop thrown at them, knock on wood.  Monkeys are very popular zoo animals.  I doubt that most visitors would find them as charming if even a tiny percentage of visitors were leaving the zoo with some brown, smelly souvenir stains on their faces.