St. Kitts Struggles to Reduce a Centuries-Old Monkey Glut

As executive director of the St. Christopher Heritage Society, Jacqueline Armony wants to save the whales, promote medicinal-plant farming, restore the old Treasury Building and generally safeguard the treasures of this Caribbean nation.

But even Armony draws the line at the vervet.

In fact, the self-described environmentalist isn’t the least bit troubled by what U.S. scientists are doing to the furry little monkeys just up the road. For the past few decades, the foreign researchers have been pumping them full of PCP, alcohol and chemicals that cause Parkinson’s disease, drilling their brains to implant human tissue and stem cells, and “sacrificing” them in experiments to cure an array of human disorders.

She isn’t even bothered by her government’s offer of a $20-a-head monkey bounty--or by the fact that the 40,000 people of the twin-island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis are virtually unanimous in their belief that the only good vervet is a dead vervet.

“They’re pests,” Armony said of the creatures that were brought here by slave-masters three centuries ago and have been busy multiplying ever since. “These monkeys were brought over here as pets, and they got away during the wars between the French and the English. Now, they’ve overrun us.

“We have to get rid of as many of them as we can to restore the ecological balance of our islands.”

So goes this little-known paradigm of humankind’s struggle to coexist with its fellow occupants of Earth--and of the battle for survival facing small island nations whose agricultural economies are being eclipsed by the politics and economics of globalization.

The basic equation is hardly high math or science. At first blush--the controversy among animal rights activists over vivisection notwithstanding--it appears a natural fit in the basic economics of supply and demand.

The supply side:

After 30 generations of virus-free breeding on two islands with no natural predators, there are now more monkeys on St. Kitts than people, scientists say.

The monkeys are eating farmers out of house and home at a time when their government is fighting a losing battle to diversify from an anachronistic sugar-cane industry. At the same time, the resorts and villas that are the result of St. Kitts’ aggressive effort to promote tourism have encroached on the habitats of the smart and voracious creatures.

The demand side:

Two U.S.-run primate-research laboratories here have been doing cutting-edge biomedical experiments to save humans, offering top dollar for monkeys either for their labs or for export to research facilities abroad. That has spawned a cottage industry of monkey trappers--most of them farmers who learned their skills fighting to save their crops.

But pressures from international animal-rights groups--and a scare in the U.S. more than a decade ago when a Southeast Asian monkey shipment arrived with a lethal virus--have slowed monkey exports from St. Kitts to a near standstill. And the scientists here barely make a dent in the exploding vervet population.

“Right now, people all over the world are desperate for monkeys and scientific primate facilities,” said Dr. Frank Ervin, the 74-year-old psychiatrist and self-described “renegade scientist” who pioneered the monkey business in St. Kitts in 1972 while working at UCLA.

“I think I could harness 5,000 monkeys a year without jeopardizing the population, and that would control the overflow into the suburbs, the back porch, the garbage can,” he said. “It would be a perpetual market for the island.”

And that would make government officials such as Agriculture Director Jerome Thomas very happy. Thomas heads the island’s Monkey Task Force, which was created three years ago to manage what he and most others here describe as a crisis.

“Quite a number of our farmers have actually been driven from their land by the monkeys,” he said. “The monkeys just come out and terrorize you. And nothing stops them--scarecrows, tape, dogs, metal traps--nothing. They’re fearless. And they eat everything.”

The monkeys travel in groups of as many as 50 formally called troops, Thomas said. They can consume more than an acre of spring onions, sweet potatoes or peanuts in just days.

“A woman up on Bird Rock swears that when she threw stones at a monkey coming in her window trying to eat mangoes off her kitchen counter, the monkey picked up the stones and threw them back at her,” Thomas said. “I consider myself an agronomist, and, as such, I am deeply concerned about the environment. But we need to create some balance here.”

Added Raphael Archibald, the Agriculture Ministry’s top bureaucrat: “We need something on a large scale. Maybe the export market is the answer. But until those monkey markets open up again, personally I favor shooting them.”

Angry Locals Seek Help

Dr. D. Eugene Redmond Jr., the prominent Yale scientist who heads the island’s most sophisticated and best-known research lab, said the monkey glut has become so acute that farmers, villa owners and even the government call on him for help.

“Every now and then, the Ministry of Agriculture calls me up and says, ‘Why aren’t you guys using more monkeys?’ ” Redmond said. Other times, homeowners or farmers phone his Biomedical Research Foundation pleading for it to send freelance monkey trappers that the foundation supports by paying them double the bounty offered by the government.

Retired restaurateur Peter Mallalieu was the most recent man in distress. “They don’t run. They don’t hide. They come in open daylight to your property and eat the hell out of your food,” he said, explaining why he begged Redmond’s staff to remove a troop that had eaten everything in his Frigate Bay backyard.

“They’re a bloody nuisance, and their economic value here is negative. The only good they do is, some tourists who come here like to look at them. But I think we should have dancing girls instead. They’re nice to look at, and they don’t eat as much fruit.”

But Redmond and Ervin advocate putting the monkeys to other uses--in an array of genetic experiments that are making significant progress in seeking treatments for human diseases that include Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, alcoholism and schizophrenia.

In every case, they say, their facilities must meet or exceed all guidelines of the U.S. public-health institutions or private foundations that are spending the millions of dollars that finance the nonprofit centers here.

“What we’re doing is research that couldn’t be done in any other way,” concluded Redmond, who conducted his first experiments in St. Kitts at Ervin’s Behavioral Sciences Foundation before he set up his own facility in 1982.

Ervin added: “If there’s any possibility a disorder can be thought of as treatable, we’ll find that out about 10 times as fast in monkeys as we will in man. . . . I am very clear in what I am doing. I am an unabashed species chauvinist. I think humans are really important.”

International opposition from animal-rights groups remains stiff. In May, 159 organizations worldwide endorsed a global moratorium on primate research, asserting, “During the last 35 years, exploitative primate research has consumed billions in American tax dollars while it has contributed very little to human welfare.”

Ervin and Redmond say they take the animal-rights activists’ arguments seriously. But, bolstered by the support of St. Kitts’ monkey-plagued society and government, they insist that such concerns are not only misplaced but counterproductive here.

Vervets Beaten, Shot

As Joseph Cabey, the 48-year-old patron saint of professional monkey trapping here who is better-known as “Monkey Joe,” recently put it: “If the researchers don’t sacrifice the monkeys, we’d actually kill them. I’ve seen farmers beat and shoot monkeys even after they were dead out of sheer frustration.

“You have so many people out here who are hurting, and the animal-rights people don’t do anything to help them. I just don’t understand it.”

Then, of course, there is the historical argument put forward by the Heritage Society’s Armony and many other intellectuals here. One need look no further than the society’s second-floor archives to understand it--and to appreciate just how long man and monkey have been at odds here.

Although no one knows for certain when the first vervet alighted on St. Kitts, most reckon it had to be in the mid-1600s, when French colonialists from Senegal and what is now Gambia resettled in the island colonies of the New World.

Many of the Caribbean islands changed hands several times as spoils of wars between the French and British, which destroyed most official records in the process. And it is only thanks to such travelers as French Roman Catholic priest Jean-Baptiste Labat that anything is known of the vervet’s roots in the new territories.

Describing a world not so unlike the St. Kitts of today, Father Labat had this to say of his stopover here in November 1700: “The monkeys that had escaped from the homes of the French folks during the war multiplied so dramatically that when the French regained control of the island monkeys were seen in large groups everywhere.

“They would even come and steal from the houses. When sugar canes, sweet potatoes and other crops were planted, it was necessary to watch over them day and night in order to prevent these animals from taking away everything.”

Labat’s memoir then detailed “a very pleasant” night of monkey hunting with local plantation owners--they killed four of them, including a mother whose baby still “clung tenaciously to her back” after she was dead. And he recounted his first-ever meal of monkey meat that night, which the priest found “a tender, delicate white meat . . . equally delicious no matter what type of sauce it is served with.”

In 1774, Britain’s Lady Andrews stopped over and added her words to local vervet lore: “Their frolics are mischievous, their thefts dexterous. They are subtle enemies and false friends. . . . In short, they are the torment of the planters, they destroy whole cane pieces in a few hours and come in troops from the mountains, whose trees afford them shelter.

“No method to get the better of them has been found.”

More than two centuries later, Archibald of the Agriculture Ministry listened to that account, shrugged and sighed.

“So, as of now, we still don’t have a solution,” he said. “Meanwhile, every day they’re getting more and more in number, braver and braver, and smarter and smarter.”