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Rare Monkeys Put Up a Howl, Slated for Zoo

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

When a Baldwin Park resident telephoned the local animal shelter last week complaining about strange, gurgling noises at night, county officials suspected some kind of monkey business.

What they found were two Mexican howler monkeys, known scientifically as Alouatta palliata, distinguished by their guttural sounds and droopy sacks of skin under their chins that inflate and vibrate whenever they howl. Native to jungles in Mexico and South America, howlers have been on the U.S. endangered species list since 1976. There are only about 100 in the United States.

After receiving the call Tuesday, two officials from Los Angeles County’s Animal Care and Control went out to the 5000 block of Landis Avenue. Sure enough, there were two black monkeys in a cage behind Martha Bedolla’s one-story, blue-and-white house.

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Bedolla says she didn’t know that the fuzzy, black primates she kept for six months were an endangered species and that it was a crime to keep them without a permit. She voluntarily gave them up, saying they had been too much trouble to care for anyway. Six months ago, she said, she bought them for $500 from a man who said he was from El Salvador and needed money to travel.

“At first, we thought they were spider monkeys or capuchins, something else,” said Lt. Jim Clark of Animal Care and Control. “But one of our employees looked in an encyclopedia and came up with the howlers.”

Primate experts from the state Department of Fish and Game and the Los Angeles Zoo later confirmed that they were black howlers, both male, each about 2 or 3 years old and weighing 10 pounds.

Authorities still haven’t decided where to put the monkeys, which appeared to be resting quietly Saturday morning in a locked cage behind the county shelter amid scraps of lettuce, hard-boiled eggs and banana peels. Federal law requires that animals on the endangered species list be placed in the care of a licensed person or a zoo. Clark said the Los Angeles Zoo has expressed interest in keeping the monkeys but fish and game officials may decide to transfer them to the San Diego Zoo.

Authorities are investigating the matter but probably will not cite Bedolla, Clark said. They believe the monkeys were smuggled across the border, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and $1,000 in fines, said Capt. Rod Simon of the Fish and Game Department.

“This is a first for us,” Clark said, adding that other primates, such as spider monkeys and gibbon apes, have been brought in. “We even had an ocelot once. But never an endangered species, until now.”

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