Hazy Future for Barbados’ Caged Green Monkeys

Now that their work in eradicating polio is nearly over, the green monkeys of Barbados face a life behind bars.

More than 2,000 of the small monkeys idle in 3-foot-high cages at the Barbados Primate Research Center, stacked row upon row at a vast maintenance yard, conjuring the image of a primate cellblock.

“We never kept more than 500 at a time or for more than three months,” said Jean Baulu, a Canadian primatologist who founded the not-for-profit research center about a quarter of a century ago.

Demand for the monkeys as research subjects has dropped dramatically in the last two years, Baulu said, because polio has all but disappeared and vaccine production has gone with it. Compounding the problem is rampant resort construction, which has crowded the primates out of their natural habitat.

Baulu created the center and the adjacent Barbados Wildlife Reserve to rescue monkeys from farmers’ shotguns. The government, in an effort to preserve the island’s crops from the monkeys, was paying a bounty of about $5 for each monkey tail presented as evidence of a kill. He wanted the monkeys to be treated more humanely, even if many of them died in the course of what he calls “beneficial research.”

The Barbados monkeys proved to be a productive source of the polio vaccine. A pair of kidneys from a green monkey can produce up to millions of doses, and the Barbados primates commanded as much as $1,500 a head at the height of the World Health Organization’s drive to defeat the childhood illness.

Eighty percent of the world’s polio vaccine came from this Caribbean island’s green monkeys, and most were sold to medical research labs in Western Europe. The primate center served as the clearinghouse, annually shuttling up to 1,000 from the lush tropical forest to facilities abroad.

Now the market has all but disappeared, and along with it the income from the sales that have funded the reserve and research center.

“I have to start from scratch,” Baulu said. “I have to make the place financially viable again.”

Despite criticism from some animal rights activists over the monkeys’ confinement, he vows to continue to take care of the animals.

“We’re up to our ears at the moment,” said Grace Griffith, an aide at the primate center. “We’ll have to look after them until they die, and they live to about 30.”

Next door to the incarcerated monkeys, which get their name from the greenish sheen their coats generate in the sun, about 50 luckier relatives frolic through the mahogany forest, communing with deer, rabbits and tortoises in a sprawling park planted with bananas, mangoes and pumpkins for their private consumption. Thousands of tourists visit the reserve each year, paying a $12 entrance fee that subsidizes the captives’ care.

Scientists say the confined monkeys can’t be released into the reserve because they would be attacked or ostracized by those already in residence.

They also cannot be placed in homes as pets, despite being smaller than most housecats and displaying behavior that appears endearingly human. The center has been the catch basin for dozens of monkeys taken in by locals who later abandoned them when they matured and turned hostile.

Before Baulu started the primate center, local farmers had been lobbying to eliminate the green monkey from the island, arguing that the animals, believed to have been brought by European settlers from West Africa in the early 1600s, were not a native species.

Baulu raised the stakes on the government bounty and offered $25 for each live monkey caught and turned over to the center unharmed. He still offers the bounty, which remains enough of an incentive that farmers continue to trap the intruders rather than shoot them.

“Most farmers would like to see every monkey dead,” said Emerald Thorington, the chief trapper for the primate center. He gets called out to capture wild monkeys creating trouble at the island’s fruit and sugar plantations and, increasingly, at construction sites.

“They can ruin someone’s livelihood, the way they take a piece of fruit and bite it, throw it aside, take another, bite it, throw it aside,” said the center’s Griffith, mimicking the animals’ profligate feeding habits. “They’re lovable, but they’re really destructive.”

Julia Horrocks, a University of the West Indies biology professor, says the government would be hard-pressed to create a protected area into which monkeys still living in the wild could be herded.

“It’s difficult to find areas far from farms on a small island,” she said. Lauding the primate center’s efforts, which have spared farmers about $5 million in damage by corralling the monkeys, she noted that it could be seen “more as rescuing farmers from the monkeys than vice versa.”

A 1980 study estimated the green monkey population to be about 5,000. More recent research suggests the number has grown to 14,000, Horrocks said. No studies have been conducted to determine an optimal population level, but all involved acknowledge that the green monkey is at no risk of extinction.

In fact, because of overcrowding at the primate center and the worse fate the monkeys might face if returned to the wild, some animal rights organizations argue the most humane solution might be euthanasia.

“I do believe for these animals there are things worse than death,” said Mary Beth Sweetland, director of research and investigations for the Virginia-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “They actually go mad from confinement. It should be a crime to do this.”

Baulu concedes the monkeys have little quality of life in their cages, although they have some diversions such as toys and mirrors. But he said he was confident he would eventually find new markets for his overstock, perhaps in behavioral studies. He argues the monkeys are clean, easy to transport and free of the diseases that afflict many African primates that are traditionally used as research subjects.

“We are resourceful people in the West Indies,” he said, outlining plans for a sweep through the biotechnology centers of Europe and North America this month and next. “I believe we can continue to use them in a humane way. I hope so, because I could fail miserably and don’t know what I would do then.”