Maya lost her mother when she was just an infant. An unfortunate and all to commonn case of impoverished people driven towards poaching wild animals to sell as pets left Maya orphaned by her monkey family and put in the hands of a larger, furless species of primate. We spent 4 months together, during which time her tail grew longer, her peach fuzz was replaced by a golden and black coarse fur, and she became a skilled tree climber, branch leaper, leave eater,and mango devourer. Though I was the suriget monkey mama, loads of people helped raise her, socializing her with playfullness, helping her forage, bringing her cornizuelo and fruit.
Tragically, we lost her to the violent actions of a pyschologically traumatized and unstable male spider monkey who suffered a similar severing from his troop as an infant.
Who's to blame? It is a hard question. The aggressive male monkey? The animal handler watching Maya at the time? The boys who took her from her home to make a few bucks? The man who bought her in an attempt to rescue/reintroduce her to the wild? The system that creates such a desperation in people that they choose to kill and lie in order to feed their own families?
Maya should never have been under the care of humans. But in an effort to reverse the actions of the humans that took her from her troop, we were trying to give her a chance to learn and grow and possibly find a new troop, a new home in the future.
The day after we buried her, a young man came to us with a baby female howler clutched to his arm, the same size Maya would have been a month from now had she not been killed. He claimed to have found her on the ground, all alone in the forest when he was cutting wood. As much as I wanted to believe him, I knew that the conviction in his voice was masking the lie that he so wanted to believe himself. Anyone who knows wild animals knows that a mother does not give up her baby without a fight, which most often means, she'll fight until death.
From here, I will do my best to channel my sadness and frustration into educating those in my community about the tragedy of removing wild animals from their natural environments, their habitat, their family. Monkeys do not make good pets. They belong with their families where they can move freely in the trees, eat fresh buds, groom each other, communicate in their tongue, and serve their role in the perfectly carved out ecological niche they fill.
I love you Maya. Your story will help to protect your monkey brothers, sisters and cousins for generations to come. May you be reunited with your real mother and any others who were killed when you were taken from your troop. I wish you all an abundance of sunshine, mangoes, broad branches and the sweetest freshest buds of the leafy trees you eat, rest, and play in.