Monkey Adventures

I only started working with the monkeys (I'm working in a psychology lab) on Friday, and I already have an arch nemesis.  The first time I met him, I was delighted because I was feeding him.  After all, I was making a monkey happy.  I will call him Wanf (we are not friends).  Towards the end of the feeding time, however, he reached through a cage square (bigger so that they can pull larger objects in, as needed in experiments), and took a swipe at me.  He knocked down my protective mask, and I stepped back, shocked.  Wanf had much better extension than I had anticipated.

On Sunday, I still hadn't learned my lesson.  The monkeys know how to trade, and he wanted to trade me the disgusting pellet of food he had for...an identical pellet of food.  Hope springs eternal.  Wanf had taken the first pellet, bashed it against the floor, and given me a pained look of, "Not this shit again!"  When I refused to trade, he threw the pellet to the floor.  As I stooped down to pick it up, he took another swipe at me.  He came back with a small clump of hair.

Wanf yanked at the strands of hair, licked them, and held his hands out to examine it.  It was different yes, but not at all tastier.  His look of befuddlement at this equally terrible food he'd protracted from my head was hilarious.  Wanf was quite distraught.  Even though there was a frizzy patch on the front of my head where he'd yanked a few strands out, I considered that round to have gone to me.

This afternoon, I was determined to do better at protecting myself.  I kept myself relatively far way from the cage squares when I saw Wanf.  Having kept my head away from the cage for the entirety of the session, and having had no encounters of the head swipe kind, I felt relatively okay.  Wanf is a small male, and so I felt that it was probably okay to let him hold my hand, like the females do.  I held out my hand, and he grasped my finger.  I thought our relationship was heading in a new direction when disaster struck.

Wanf grabbed the tip of my glove and yanked.  I'd been warned that monkeys might try to take chunks out of my glove, but I'd never seen it in action before.  He pulled on the glove, trying to rip off one of the latex fingers, and I pulled back, shrieking, "Help!"  My lab partners stood, watching silently.  I turned to one of them to beseech her with my eyes, and she shrugged.  Why was I overreacting so severely, and what was she supposed to do?

I finally wrestled my punctured glove away, disillusioned.  But I felt better when, five minutes later, Wanf got a chunk out of another lab person's glove, and she was forced to trade the monkey a peanut for the chunk of glove.  That's right, the monkeys do it on purpose.  They know that you'll trade them tasty peanuts for the chunk of glove that could potentially harm them.  And they smile gleefully as lab personnel are forced to acquiesce.

Wanf: 2, Meredith: 1

technorati tags:monkeys, college, adventures, research