Five kinds of monkeys and apes I’d like to see in the wild
5x5 It’s been a busy Monday, so here’s a quick 5x5 about real apes and monkeys that I’d like to encounter in the wild (good zoos and wildlife centres are OK, but nothing beats a monkey encounter in their own territory).
1 Gorillas Highland or lowland, I’m not bothered, but I’d love to get up close with gorillas in the wilds or Rwanda or the Congo. Time’s not on my side, either, with both types of gorilla in danger: highland monkeys face poachers and loss of habitat, while lowland gorillas have all that to put up with, and they’re under attack from diseases including Simian Immunodeficiency Virus and Ebola.
2 Japanese snow monkeys Famous for bathing in hot springs during the cold winter months, the Japanese macaque or nihonzaru is one of the most intelligent Old World monkey species, and are not endangered, often living alongside human settlements. I don’t think they’d be ready to share a hot spring, but they’re pretty easy to find. They’re also another good reason for a return trip to Japan, as if I need more.
3 Orangutans Seriously endangered due to poaching, the illegal pet trade, and humanity’s apparent addiction to putting palm oil in everything (palm oil plantations replacing their habitats), orangutans are highly intelligent great apes with widely-documented inventive tool use and cultural transmission, as well as linguistic abilities. There’s also a lot of conservation activity focused on the remaining populations, which means great opportunities to see them in the wild, and you get to go to Borneo or Sumatra.
4 Bonobos There’s a right-wingey myth that humans are most related to chimpanzees of all the primates, therefore their sometimes brutal behaviour gives us a get-out clause for our own brutality. It’s bullshit peddled by people who don’t want to take responsibility for themselves, demonstrated nowhere better than by our equally close cousins, the bonobos, who are just as smart as chimps but have a far more peaceful matriarchal society and solve most of their disagreements by shagging. Seriously, bonobos think chimps are just dicks. Unfortunately, they’re very hard to find in the wild because they’re terribly endangered by poaching and habitat loss, and are understandably very shy.
5 Vervets In no way endangered, vervets live side-by-side with humans all over the world, and ‘in the wild’ doesn’t mean much, because they get everywhere. This blue-balled chap was a regular visitor to the Kenyan hotel I stayed at in 2007, where we forgot to shut the patio doors, and found him right next to the bed while we having a nap, stealing away with a tube of breadsticks. This turned out to be a lucky escape, because they were known to regularly steal passports and jewellery. I was so excited by a monkey in the room that he was welcome to our snacks (but thank god he didn’t get the artisan humus #middleclassproblems).
