u/ApeSht-Zine

Photo by Chris Ulliott/flickr. 

When a researcher at the University of Wisconsin tried to study the abilities of pygmy marmosets, the monkeys solved challenges quickly but quickly grew bored and simply sat in the middle of the mazes, refusing to participate further. (What’s that about a “lower” primate?) The study had to be canceled. 

From ”The Accidental Primatologist” by Charles T. Snowden in Primate Ethnographies, edited by Karen B Strier (Routledge, 2016). Via Ape Shit zine.

Indris are among the rare nonhuman mammals known to have a sense of rhythm, expressed thru song. These lemurs urinate and defecate jointly as a group in one of their territory's designated pee spots. Critically endangered in Madagascar, they don’t survive captivity. (Sam Whitfield/flickr) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indri

After seeing her family slaughtered, Congo, once in captivity in the US, grew fixated on a mirror. Robert Yerkes interpreted her "infinite loneliness" as "mental deficiency," concluding that gorillas are inferior to chimps.

Yerkes wrote about Congo in The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life (1929). See also: Georgina M. Montgomery, "Infinite Loneliness: the life and times of Miss Congo." Endeavor. 28 July 2009.

Turns out nonhuman primates get their "pets" just like we do: by stealing them from their moms!

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/1942/05/25/archives/chimpanzee-flees-cage-then-frees-kitten-and-gives-show-in-petstore.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BFE.7fK5.aF99OIjaIgMr&smid=url-share

An ad from Wide World Magazine, 1919, via the Internet Archive.

In 1940, Bob & Mae Noell started a travelling show selling tickets to see men fight a "gorilla" — actually, a chimp. The chimps wore muzzles, which wasn’t enough to stop them from ripping out opponents' noses apart and aiming to take out eyes. So their hands had to be bound as well. 

Humans were required to wear helmets (the apes got no such protection, nor needed it) and a special pair of pants — because the chimps would rip their opponents' clothes off.

The men who stepped up to fight tended to be drunk — some, very much so. So even with their handicaps, the chimps never lost. For every 10 men who entered the ring, roughly 8 had to be carried out. 

One of Mae Noell’s biggest challenges was convinincing dummies who wanted to fight chimps that the protections were for their own safety. Her solution: awards for only those who played by the rules. Touch the chimp’s muzzle, you don’t get a prize — and you may just get yr fingers bit off.

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Courtesy of Ape Shit zine. More for background, see Bandwagon, Nov-Dec 2006 and "My Visit to Chimp Farm." Images from Moe Noell's _History of Noell's Ark Gorilla Show_ (1979)

Just watched this 13 minute film on YouTube and recommend it. It examines the ethical difficult faced by a shepherd who opposes animal slaughter yet makes his living off of it.... No easy answers here, as the head of 269 Animal Liberation calls him out on his contradictions when she comes to rescue a couple of animals in his flock. Beautifully shot, as are all We Animal productions. (As editor of an animals zine, I'm grateful for their awesome, open-access stock photo library.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5GyirjyUY8

Limbani is in quarentine with other special needs chimps at Save the Chimps sanctuary in Florida. While he awaits his move to an island chimp group, he gets a bit of entertainment from Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. See savethechimps.org

I'm uploading old issues of my zine. In one case, I replaced the file I uploaded with a corrected version but instead of replacing the original PDF, I seem to have added the new version to the other, resulting in a file double the length. (see https://archive.org/details/stay-free-21 )

How do I fix? Should I delete everything and reupload? (tho I thought that's what I had done before)

In 1993, scientists conducted an experiment in which they housed young rhesus macaques with slightly older stump-tail macaques. Rhesus are known for being pretty aggressive, whereas stump-tails are relatively chill -- they ignore minor slights & reconcile after conflicts.

The experiment tested whether the stumpies’ pacifism would rub off on the rhesus monkeys.

At first, the 2 species avoided each other, but over time that self-segregation diminished. By the end of 5 months, all of the monkeys were grooming each other & sleeping in a single huddle. 

Moreover, the rhesus macaques adopted their older cousins’  friendly nature & reconciled after conflicts as often as the stump-tails. The rhesus didn't exactly copy other behaviors; they continued acting like rhesus, just with a friendly disposition. 

(See Frans de Waal, Good Natured, 1996, pp 179-180.)

In the 1960s, a monkey caged with a hippo at Mesker Zoo in Indiana developed a nightly habit of picking Hippy’s teeth for food scraps. Local photographer Sonny Brown spent over a year trying to capture the routine, which ran in the Evansville Courier in 1961 and was reproduced in LIFE. (Photo by Sonny Brown)

A study recently published in Primates surveys examples of primates’ cross-species relationships, both in the wild and in captivity. Most of these relationships were with other primates (with whom they share a habitat), but dogs, cats, and other mammals were also fairly common.

The most common interactions found were play and grooming. The young tended to seek out play with other species and adult females tend to groom, picking off bugs and debris off of other animals. Adult males were less likely to interact with other species. When they did, they were more likely to be abusive than the others, but their encounters were more often friendly than not. 

See:

Grueter, C.C., Roncin, F., Nekaris, K.AI. et al. Heterospecific social behavior in primates: insights into the evolutionary roots of pet-keeping. Primates (2026).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-026-01281-0

Just want to share these important, research-based resources for helping monkeys.

Both of these key sources recommend AGAINST sharing videos and images of monkeys and apes with humans. Even in cases where the sharing is well-intended and critical, it ends up unwittingly fueling the primate pet trade. The SMAC guidelines, additionally, say to NOT engage with or share troubling social media content online -- instead, REPORT it without otherwise drawing attention to it, and encourage others to do the same.

The IUCN guidelines on best practices for responsible images of nonhuman primates: https://human-primate-interactions.org/best-practice-guidelines-responsible-images-of-non-human-primates/

The Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition (SMAC)
https://www.endcrueltyonline.com/macaque-report

The IUCN publishes the Red List for Endangered Species.
SMAC is a coalition of many international animal groups, including the RSPCA, the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance, and the International Primate Protection League, among many others.

Full story paywalled at https://www.newspapers.com/image/605654315

Global Data From Great Ape Zoo Populations Confirm a High Prevalence of Overweight Individuals (American Journal of Primatology, July 2026)
by João Pedro Meireles, Sarah Byrne, Paul W. Dierkes, Miriam Göbel, Max Hahn-Klimroth, Arun Idoe, Dennis W. H. Müller, Zjef Pereboom, Jana Pluháčková, Sandra Reichler...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajp.70185

Obesity has been a problem for captive great apes for decades, but zoos as a whole have yet to move the needle much. Some clear remedies are discussed in this study. Most importantly, a change is diet is needed: more fiber and leafy edibles and less — or, better yet, no — cultivated fruit. Yep, no more bananas.

The authors speculate that some zoos may be motivated to address the problem less out of concern for obesity than to reduce apes’ unsightly habit of regurgitating food and eating it again. This tends to happen more with cultivated fruit, which also tends to prompt more hoarding & fighting.

Male bonobos are the outlier, the only demographic who tend NOT to be obese — maybe because all of the females take the fruit from them?

Spotted this graphical abstract from the latest _American Journal of Primatology_ and thought, "hey, this looks interesting," only to check out the written abstract and find it almost comically laden with jargon and passive verbiage. Even a lay reader familiar with these words (see second screenshot) mean finds the written description puzzling.

Dear scientists: Please keep in mind that some non-scientists may actually be interested in your work!

Solly Zuckerman’s Functional Affinities of Man, Monkeys, and Apes (1933) includes this single photo to represent all chimpanzees. 

Zuckerman is mostly known for The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (1932), a book that somehow became an earlier primatology classic, despite getting a lot wrong. Mind-boggingly dense about animal emotions, Zuckerman likely landed on a photo that poetically captured the experience of captive chimps without actually realizing it.