By Mary Lynn Campbell
Thank you for once again joining us here on the primate care site. This time we will be talking about travel cages that will be needed for monkeys as we travel away from our homes. During this post we will not only be talking about cages but we will also be talking about important things you need to know if you choose to travel across state lines with your monkeys.
By Mary Lynn Campbell
Leroy (18 years old) is a happy monkey in his special space.
Welcome once again to the Primate Care site. In my last post I spoke about toys and many of the safety issues surrounding using them for monkeys. I wanted to speak more about building a safe and happy place for your monkey but first I am writing about the importance of setting up an extra savings account for your monkey.
This special account will allow you to comfortably cover vet bills and other important needs that will arise for your baby monkey in the months and years that follow. We as monkey caregivers seem to experience many of the same things that parents of human children do. We begin to get all excited about our new monkey coming and begin to collect toys, diapers, diaper covers, clothes, monkey bottles and blankets, and of course, their travel cage and then their play cage.
Many of you who will be getting a monkey may already be part of a group of monkey caregivers, or have a friend that has a monkey or you may be choosing to get your information about caring for a monkey from this site.
By Mary Lynn Campbell
Olivia – 5 Weeks Old
Happy New Year From Primate Care. We are excited to start 2018 with a post about monkey toys. All monkeys love toys from the very beginning of their lives. In my book “Living With Monkeys”, which is for sale on our sister site primatestore.com, I wrote about helping baby monkeys to not bite by offering things for them to chew on instead of your fingers, hands and hair. Yes, even your hair can become one of their favorite play things. Monkeys love to chew on everything.
When Bob and I were raising Silly Willy and he started to put his mouth on us, I knew it was time to offer him something to put his mouth on instead of us. Baby monkeys are not able to hold extremely large toys, so I went through the house and gathered things that I felt would fit into his small hands and then put small dishes full of these things into the rooms of the house that he was taken into.
The things that I chose to put into the dishes were things like: plastic Bic pen tops, medium size springs, medium size washers, large paper clips, medium key rings, plastic rings that are used to hang toys on baby cribs, plastic coke bottle caps, milk bottle caps, and any other small safe things that I could find. Of course, I washed these toys frequently to ensure that they were safe for my little guy.
I have also learned from many other monkey caregivers that some babies come with even more of a “mouthy problem” than Silly Willy came with and that their monkeys chose to put their mouth on everyone’s hands every time their baby monkey was being handle
. I know this must be a challenging behavior as a caregiver is trying to train their baby monkey to not do this. Due to this being such a problem, the little ones will become very hard to deal with when languaging with them using the word ‘NO’ so often.