Boward County fair will feature monkeys riding on dogs

The year’s major attraction at the Broward County Fair is usually the Ferris wheel, a carnival staple that ... wait a second, is that a monkey riding on top of a dog?

It is: Splashed across the Broward County Fair’s website is an attraction dubbed Banana Derby, in which two capuchin monkeys named Gilligan and Burt ride dog-back along a roped-off race track. The monkey riders, of course, are dressed in tiny jockey outfits.

They’re a featured highlight of this year’s fair festivities, kicking off Thursday and continuing through Dec. 5 with 75 carnival rides, midway games and food vendors. The carnival expects to draw roughly 40,000 fairgoers over its 18-day run at 1000 N. State Road 7, a triangular fairground and former home of the Margate Swap Shop.

The pandemic scuttled plans for the 2020 Broward County Fair, and this year’s lineup of attractions is roughly half the size of the 2019 edition, which featured none of the carnival’s usual menagerie of animals. Horses and goats — and, yes, monkeys on dogs — are all on the bill this year. Phil Hendricks, the South Carolina-based owner of Banana Derby, says he got inspired to host exhibition races when Gilligan, their pet monkey, started riding the family dog in their living room.

“They’re trained to ride, not bound to the dogs,” Hendricks says. “The monkeys and the hounds love it.” Another sideshow attraction, Goat Island, is both a petting zoo and sideshow featuring goats climbing and trotting across a display of towers and bridges.

There also will be motorcycle racing inside steel cage globes, aquatic acrobat stunts, comedy hypnosis and dance shows.

You’d be forgiven for wondering why the city of Margate is hosting this year’s jamboree. The fair has become a vagabond in recent years, hopscotching from Hallandale Beach to Pembroke Pines and back. The fair went on hiatus from 2012 to 2017 as city officials put up roadblocks against hosting fairs, but eventually returned in 2018 and 2019 to Hallandale Beach.

BROWARD COUNTY FAIR AND BANANA DERBY Capuchin monkeys dressed in horse jockey outfits will ride atop dogs as one of the featured attractions at the 2021 Broward County Fair, running from Thursday through Dec. 5 in Margate.