More Monkey Business!

Monkey goes into business for itself
June 22 2005 at 08:55AM
By Linda MbongwaThe Johannesburg Zoo's "Zoo to You" programme came to the people, but not the way zookeepers intended.For more than two hours, Johannesburg's Jan Smuts Avenue was closed to traffic to allow emergency services to capture a monkey that had escaped from the zoo on Tuesday.A zookeeper noticed one of their seven mona monkeys was missing from the cage when he made his daily check. On further inspection, zoo staff spotted the German-born monkey lurking just outside its cage, tried to catch it but it proved much too elusive for them.After leading the keepers a merry dance around the zoo, the monkey scaled a perimeter wall and nipped over Jan Smuts Avenue, disappearing up a tree in Parkview.
Jennifer Gray, Joburg Zoo CEO, said metro police and the Johannesburg fire department had helped capture the monkey.A vet was summoned to dart it and the fire department had used a ladder to pull the sleeping monkey from the tree."It was taken to hospital where the anaesthetic was reversed to wake him up and for a vet to check if everything was fine," said Gray. Zoo spokesperson Senzo Ngcobo said the monkey had been brought to the zoo from Germany with six others about three months ago.The monkeys, which are found in Grenada in the Caribbean, had completed the zoo's mandatory quarantine period. The period, which lasts between 13 and 45 days, involves isolating and constantly monitoring the monkeys to check whether they were adapting and disease-free.Ngcobo said he had received calls from people complaining that perhaps the Joburg Zoo was taking the "Zoo To You" campaign bit too far."Zoo To You" is a mobile zoo programme, in which animals such as snakes are taken to different areas, mostly to schools that cannot afford to bring their pupils to the zoo.