Hello!

Last week I shared a post called “Legal or Ethical: The Primate Pet Trade” where I began to discuss the STAMP It Out campaign being lead by Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre. (Featured image in this post also belongs to Monkey World.)

A day after that blog post came out, Monkey World shared this post on their Facebook feed, so I’m here, once again, to talk to you about why this is so important, because we only have two months to act on it!

So, once again, what is the STAMP it out campaign? STAMP stands for Stop The Trade and Abuse of Monkeys as Pets. It’s aimed at making it illegal to own a primate as part of the UK pet trade.

Why should you care? Simply put, it’s for the health, safety and wellbeing of primates, and also a way to try and tackle the illegal poaching of primates as a way to feed into this market.

Monkeys that are most commonly kept as pets in the UK include marmosets, who are kept in some horrific conditions – including, but not limited to hamster cages. As in the ones that are seen as being too small for a hamster. They are fed a very poor diet that does not cater to what they actually require, they are not often kept with their own kind (imagine if you were kept in a cage without another human to talk to. We are social creatures just like these other non-human primates). Overall, most of the time, keeping a monkey as a pet is seen as a novelty, it’s entertaining to own one, but they aren’t domesticated like dogs and cats. They are wild animals who should not be kept in a home, they should be out with their own kind.

Why else is this important? Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre have a TV show called Monkey Life, it’s available for all to view as all bar the new series are showing every Sunday on the free channel, Pick. Not only does Monkey Life show you what the work they do at the park involves, but it shows you their rescues first hand. You see the horrifying conditions that these monkeys are being rescued from. I vividly remember seeing one episode where 3 marmosets were rescued from a caravan, the caravan looked as though the insides hadn’t been cleaned in months and the three monkeys were just overrulling the place. Thankfully, they now reside at the more natural environment provided by the rescue centre – but they shouldn’t be there in the first place. They, once again, should be in the wild.

This is an ever growing problem, and there are, like I briefly mentioned in my last post, videos circulating online showing monkeys, and other animals, as cute pets. The issue is that the circulation of these videos and images lead to the continuation of abuse that these animals go through. I don’t doubt that a percentage of the people who keep these animals in their homes believe they’re doing the right thing by them, but in the long run, it’s just not fair on them. Take, for instance, orangutan Oshine who lives at the Orangutan nursery at the park. In her previous life, before coming to the park, she was living as a pet at a home in South Africa. Her diet was so bad that she was obscenely overweight and had her diet controlled upon arrival to Monkey World.

So, what can we do? DEFRA have now launched an 8 week consultation period to change the law on primates as pets. This is the last stage before this goes to parliament. This, at the moment, is only for England but anything that we can do to help is a massive boost for these animals. Here is the link, this is a survey-like webpage consisting of 10 pages which ask you for your opinions on the new proposed legislations being considered, it should take you no more than 3 minutes to read and answer, please take the time to fill it out and give your opinion on this matter.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post, I really do appreciate it.

Until next time, be excellent to each other