Don't Fence Me In

"Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage."

- To Althea, from Prison, Richard Lovelace

Monkey islands, like those described in the article shared yesterday, used to be almost ubiquitous in zoological facilities.  Some of them have been rather grandiose structures, such as the Japanese macaque habitat at the Central Park Zoo, which is in use to this day.  Others were sorry little affairs, little more than a like a cement truck unloaded in the middle of the zoo with a puddle of water formed around it.

My one experience with a monkey island has been the latter.  It was small, ugly, and a total pain in the butt to service.  This was in large part because there was no place to shift the monkeys to, so we had to wade ashore every day in the company of our troop, including the rather surly male.  Also, it made it a major challenge to catch up the monkeys to bring them in during inclement weather, as there was no room for a real shelter on the little island.  I was thrilled when we finally moved the troop to an exhibit on "the mainland."

It seemed that I was the only one.

Our visitors hated it.  It didn't matter that they literally had three to four times as much space as they had on the island.  It didn't seem to matter that they also had an indoor area to go into for shelter, which meant that they could stay outside for longer into the year.  It also meant that they could be worked with more safely, as we could shift them.  There were more climbing structures, better substrates (grass and mulch and dirt as opposed to just concrete), and all around better everything.  Visitors didn't care.  They insisted that the monkeys were sad.  Because they were in a cage.

Humans punish other humans, such as criminals, by putting them in cages.  They have for millennia.  As such, a prison cell is a nightmare for many people - one of the most common movie tropes is the man or woman who is falsely accused of a crime and sent to prison, only to escape somehow.  The thing is, monkeys and other animals don't have prisons.  A monkey doesn't think that it's in jail - it recognizes the bars as a barrier that it cannot pass through.  It does not have our obsessive fear of bars.

In fact, as far as a monkey is concerned, bars aren't as much a prison as they are a play thing.  A barred fence forms one massive climbing structure.  Put them on an island, and they are surrounded by lots of pretty air - which they can't climb on.  I personally like to see monkeys in open air enclosures - it's better for photography and observations.  Still, it's incredible to watch a monkey race up the walls of its enclosure, leap from the fencing onto a branch and continue to swing along without stopping.  For some primates, the less arboreal ones, fencing might not be such an enormous asset.  For arboreal ones, it can offer a lot of enrichment.

In situations where it is possible, it is great to have enclosures that are natural in appearance and still provide optimal habitat for the animals.  When we are forced to choose, however, we shouldn't sacrifice what is best for the animals to satisfy our own prejudices of what makes us feel better.