MONKEY BUSINESS
Hungry monkeys run riot, female macaque breaks the glass ceiling, and a strange legend from Kesey country
MONKEY RIOT
In Lopburi, Thailand, the city centre was brought to a standstill by a massive brawl between rival troops of crab-eating macaques, an unexpected side effect of the Covid pandemic. The monkeys live in large groups both on the streets and in the city’s temple complexes and are usually amply fed by tourists visiting the city. With Covid drastically reducing tourist numbers, the monkeys have been feeling the pinch. The riot began when monkeys from the Phra Prang Sam Yot temple complex ventured out into the streets in search of food. When one of the temple monkeys picked up an empty yogurt carton, it attracted the ire of the street monkeys, who saw it as an intruder onto their territory, and fell upon the “invaders”. This precipitated a vicious brawl involving tens of monkeys that lasted nearly five minutes, brought one of Lopburi’s busiest intersections to a standstill and left many monkeys on both sides injured and bleeding. Vet Supakarn Kaewchot said, “They are so used to tourists feeding them, with tourists gone they’re more aggressive. They’re invading buildings and forcing people to flee their homes.” Sun, 27 July 2021.
ALPHA FEMALE
For the first time in the 70 years that biologists have been monitoring a 677-strong troop of Japanese macaques in the Takasakiyama natural zoological garden in Oita city on the island of Kyushu, a female has become their leader, something almost never seen among primates. Nine-year-old Yakei first became the alpha female in the troop in April, deposing her own mother, then in June she took on Sanchu, the 31-year-old male who was then head of the troop and successfully beat him up to take over as the troop’s boss monkey. Wardens tested her status with a “peanut test” where they put out nuts and saw who was the first to eat them: Sanchu backed off and allowed Yakei to take the first one, confirming her status. Since becoming leader, she has been walking round with her tail up and climbing trees to shake them, both expressions of power rarely seen in female macaques. guardian.com, 9 Aug 2021.
“THE SHAVED”
Since the 1960s there have been persistent rumours of feral monkeys living in the woods around La Honda, California. Today, La Honda is a quiet countryside community, but in the 1960s it was home to Ken Kesey and the site of the acid tests that Tom Wolfe wrote about in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, involving Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, Hell’s Angels, The Grateful Dead, Hunter S Thompson, Allen Ginsberg and others. Investigating the rumours, journalist Rae Alexander spoke to locals who, while preferring to remain anonymous, confirmed that in the 1980s sightings of monkeys were so common that they had their own nickname “The Shaved”, so called because they all seemed to have mangy bald patches. One resident said “[People] were finding them in their driveways, they were finding them dead. And these monkeys are living off people’s garbage. I heard they were friendly to humans. Some people would feed the monkeys and leave food out for them.” The origin of the creatures is rumoured to be Stanford University, which, in the early 1960s was a focus of government-funded research into hallucinogens and where one of the key researchers (or possibly lab technicians) was a La Honda resident named Bill Maquis. Maquis who, in later years, was universally known as “Monkey Bill” by the locals, was allegedly responsible for carrying out hallucinogen research on monkeys, although he apparently never gave them anything he didn’t try himself. For this purpose, he was supposed to have kept “25 to 35” primates caged in his La Honda backyard. When, later in the decade, the government pulled research funds, the monkeys were scheduled to be euthanised, but local rumour has it that Monkey Bill, along with Kesey and some of the Pranksters, released the primates into the wild while tripping.
Documentary footage unearthed by Alexander shows an exceedingly fried-looking Monkey Bill confirming he kept primates on his premises, but only five or six, and that it was later, between 1974 and 76, when he used them for testing samples sent to him by the Drug Enforcement Agency, saying, “[The monkeys] would get very still on the psychedelic drugs. Higher doses, their eyes would dart back and forth.” He doesn’t reveal their ultimate fate, though. Maquis and Kesey are now dead, so it has proved impossible to verify the rumours directly, but ex-Merry Prankster Ken Babbs says: “The story about Kesey’s involvement with the LSD test monkeys is a bunch of bullshit. That was some guy down on the coast. Kesey was not involved with releasing them into the wilds of La Honda.” There are still occasional monkey sightings in La Honda, so it remains possible that there might be some substance to the story. If The Shaved are still living in the California hills, though, they would have to be offspring of the original monkeys, given that more than 50 years have now passed. Kqed.com, 22 Sep; detroitbookfest.com, 4 Dec 2020.