River has pushy panhandlers hanging in trees : Florida officials would like to remove 250 monkeys from tourist attraction. The animals have many fans.

Many years before Mickey Mouse--or even Walt Disney--was born, a monumental artesian limestone spring east of this old town in central Florida became the state’s first great tourist attraction.

Aboard steamboats negotiating winding streams all the way from Jacksonville, early eco-tourists--including Ulysses S. Grant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford--came to relax and marvel at huge fish deep in the gin-clear water gushing from the earth.

Visitors from all over the world still come to see the spring and ride glass-bottom boats down the seven-mile-long Silver River that flows from it.

Along the banks, they can see all manner of creatures in the wild--turtles; fat, contented alligators; elusive river otters; great blue herons, and acrobatic rhesus monkeys. Rhesus monkeys? In the wild? In Florida? Indeed.

As many as 250 of them in several troops are on the loose--this after more than 200 were captured during the 1980s. They swing in the trees along the river, hide out in the Ocala National Forest, occasionally loll on boat docks on the Ocklawaha River and show up near the community of Ft. McCoy.

Several years ago, a North Carolina family canoeing found itself surrounded by 60 to 80 monkeys after a small boy taunted one of them with food.

Reports indicate that they have harassed picnickers and dogs in the area and raided orange groves. The first reported trouble came more than 50 years ago, when a lawman shot a monkey for what was regarded as threatening behavior.

Folklore has it that the monkeys were left behind when MGM came to film the first of six Tarzan movies along the river. The truth is that they were already here when Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O’Sullivan arrived with a chimpanzee to make “Tarzan Finds a Son.”

Ancestors of the animals that now beguile tourists were brought in by an entrepreneur in 1938. Colonel Tooey--he wasn’t a colonel, his name was Colonel--released a monkey troop on an island in the river, figuring they would enhance visitors’ illusions of traveling through a jungle.

Tooey, manager of the Silver River Jungle Boat Cruise, knew more about tourists than he knew about monkeys. The animals swam off the island and have proliferated in the forest--intermittent efforts to deport, sterilize or kill them notwithstanding. But, as Tooey expected, they have added to the appeal of the Silver Spring Attraction.

The bad news is that two years ago, the monkeys were found to be infected with simian Herpes B virus, which can be fatal if transmitted to humans through a bite.

The state of Florida--which had long been interested in taking over the commercial Silver Spring Attraction, removing all of its exotic species and turning the area into a state park--by that time had acquired 4,000 acres along the river.

Mark Glisson of the state Division of Recreation and Parks stepped in to get rid of the monkeys, planning--after consultation with Humane Society officials--to trap, tranquilize and kill them.

“I blithely stepped into it and very quickly learned that euthanasia is not an option,” he said. Almost overnight, animal welfare activists and visitors captivated by the monkeys produced petitions with thousands of signatures demanding that they be spared. When the Ocala Star-Banner solicited reader opinions, it received 625 replies, 615 of them calling for the monkeys to remain along the river.

But the viral infection demanded that something be done. The monkeys, Glisson said, “are not only intelligent, gregarious and adaptive, but pushy and very aggressive.”

The state has postponed opening its 4,000 acres along the river, although the public can pass through in boats. “Everything else,” Glisson said, “has been deferred until the monkey issue is resolved.”

Late last year, owners of the Silver Spring Attraction at the spring itself agreed to sell their remaining property and facilities to the state. Under the arrangement, the owners will continue to operate their animal attractions, the boat rides and tourist facilities for another 15 years.

When the property is turned over to the state, it is understood that all of the exotic species, monkeys included, will be gone.

It is up to the Legislature to decide how.

A study led by the University of Florida has presented several options, including euthanasia, sterilization, relocation or confinement in a huge compound.

All of these would require capture. But that, said one bemused local resident, would pose no great difficulty.

All it would require, he said, is that Silver Spring Attraction officials stop feeding them sweet potatoes, as they do to keep them on the property. Then they would simply walk into local restaurants, where they could be arrested, he says.