Brown spider monkey - Nearly Extinct

A member of an unnamed species of monkey living in Bangkok /Thailand actually wasn’t even domesticated, but a wild animal. Yet tourists always tried to attract it with cups of coca cola or fast food. In the end the male monkey was so overweight that experts feared he would die. Thus now environmentalists caught the animal and brought it to a place where it would be fed normal food before being released into the wild.
These news published by “Tierschutz Euskirchen” remind me of the many people in Germany who enjoy attracting pigeons or ducks with old bread – not realizing that bread is harmful to these birds and even small particles of Mold can kill them.
If you enjoy so much the company of animals like these, the least you could do is to inform yourself what would be appropriate food for these animals…and of course you should always check if said food you bought for them is still edible before feeding it to them.

The German informative show “Quarks und Co” – their latest episode that is – says that despite multiple animal testings – especially on primates as they are so akin to men – just in Germany every 15 second a patient ends up in hospital or at a doctor’s due to having been given medicine with negative side-effects. Thus “Quarks und Co” suggests asking about negative side effects and informing them about your allergies before embracing any new medicament.

“Tierschutz Euskirchen” says that three and a half weeks ago it was decided that the German circus “Belly” – the last circus in Germany that was allowed to expose an ape for entertainment – was to give the chimpanzee – that means not a spider monkey – “Robbie” away to an organisation that will train him to live with other apes again.
The court decided that holding him in a small cage with no chimpanzee companion was not species-appropriate and that the argument that the circus-staff and “Robbie” were so close was thus invalid.
—-—-—-—-
Re-upload: “http://www.primate.org/”
People who know me also can say what to expect from this website.
However there is another monkey called black – headed spider monkey. As you may guess by their very similar names, they are related. If you want to help this monkey as well, you should know about the organisation the website “http://www.brookfieldzoo.org/CZS/Support-the-Society”.

One of the latest episodes of “Top 10”, called “10 komische Fakten über die Evolution” (Ten Strange Facts About Evolution) also talked about the plantaris muscle. While approximately 91% of all human beings still are born with this muscle, it usually is very underdeveloped and thus rather useless to the human body. Monkeys however have much stronger plantaris muscles which also explains why they can easily hold on to branches, ropes etc. while we would have extreme difficulties trying to do so. Paleontologists see this as another argument to back up the theory of evolution. It makes perfect sense that human beings and monkey both have this muscle – even though in the human body it is nothing but a rudiment – if you consider that they both descend from the same ancestors. Perhaps two species of monkeys descended from this ancestors: One, namely the ancestor of apes and monkeys that was adapted to a life in the trees rather than on the floor – and thus was forced to use this muscle regularly – and one that just was meant to live on the floor and thus didn’t use its plantaris muscle too much until it would eventually be nothing but an almost ignorable rudiment. From the latter descended our ancestors, the first human beings.

In the documentary movie “Tod im Labor – Warum Tierversuche sinnlos sind” (Death In a Laboratory – Why Animal Testings Don’t Make Sense) they claim that many of the monkeys scientists use for their testings got caught in the wild. I don’t imagine they’d go so far as to catch critically endangered animals like mountain gorillas, brown spider monkeys or gibbons, but this still is horrible. All specimens of monkeys are highly intelligent animals and the family structures of most of them look very similar. Family members are very close together and there even is video footage that shows monkeys caring for gravely ill family members or mourning their dead ones. Now imagine how hard it must be for the individual and for its family to be separated. As I just stated they most likely are able to feel empathy and the bonds within the family is very strong. Thus – even though most people may not know that – this is a great loss for the whole family, because they don’t know where their friend is going and if they will ever see this family member again. At least we humans know the answer “No, they will never see their family member again, because it will either die in an experiment or get euthanized afterwards!” What disgusted me the most was when they used a pregnant monkey to test some emergency contraception. Not only was I disturbed when they killed the baby-monkey – yes, she still gave birth -, but it just upsetted me when I heard what an expert the makers of this movie interviewed said. He said that monkeys may be very similar to human beings, but the results still don’t say too much about what this emergency contraception would have done to a human lady. Firstly the monkeys in this laboratory all showed signs of stress and anormal behavior – women usually aren’t too stressed and mentally sane when they take this pill – and secondly there indeed are difference between a monkey and a human being – and I’m not talking about the difference in size. Thus the gentleman who gave this interview concluded that this experiment can’t say too many certain things about the risks of this product.
P.S. I just found this interesting and worth getting mentioned. So I posted it…under the picture of a monkey.