Category Archives: Monkey News

Adopting an Emperor Tamarin

Emperor Tamarin. Photo from Como Zoo.To celebrate the holiday season Monkey Outta Nowhere adopted an Emperor Tamarin from the nearby Como Zoo. The zoo has seven tamarins in the primate exhibit and we opted to support the smallest of the monkeys for its Seuss-like qualities. It’s always been one of our favorites.

And why support a monkey at all? Como Zoo is a top-notch urban zoo that’s a great low-cost attraction for families (donations are suggested, but not required). That’s a cause worth supporting.

We hope you and your family–and the tamarin’s–have a happy holiday.

Drunk Monkeys

Drunk monkeys, it seems, are a lot like drunk people. They drink more when they’re alone, they like to drink after a hard day’s work and they’ll often drink until they fall asleep. You can’t make this stuff up. Apparently you need a team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health Animal Center in Maryland working to find primate parrallels to human alcoholism in order to treat symptoms of relapse. Or they just wanted to see monkeys get smashed.

Chimp Tops Warhol

2005_06_27congo.jpgPaintings by a chimpanzee named Congo sold for more than $25,000 at auction earlier this month, while works by Andy Warhol and Renoir attracted so little attention they had to be withdrawn. The artworks were created by Congo in the late 1950s at the London Zoo. Pablo Picasso owned one of Congo’s works and Salvidor Dali liked the chimp so much he proclaimed, “The hand of the chimpanzee is quasihuman; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!” (link via Jeremy)

SWAT Monkey

A Mesa, Ariz. police veteran has proposed training a capuchin monkey for high-risk police operations. The SWAT team monkey could unlock doors and search buildings on command, keeping SWAT personnel out of harm’s way. A federal grant would pay for a pilot program to train the monkey, though the idea is still in the proposal stage and hasn’t been cleared by the Mesa police department’s executive ranks.

Monkey Mayhem

Lincoln Park Zoo's Regenstein Center for African ApesWhen the zoo says don’t pound on the glass, they mean it. And now they’re giving chimps a way to fight back. Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo opened a new habitat for apes that lets chimpanzees touch a panel and shoot harmless blasts of air at unsuspecting visitors.

The new feature should help people and primates interact in a safe way. Though Chicago’s not the first place to let monkeys fight back. The Los Angeles Zoo lets apes pull on ropes to ring bells or spray water at visitors. Now who’s being watched?