Two 5-week-old baby spider monkeys made it to the El Paso Zoo after being rescued from smugglers who were hiding the animals squished in the center console of a truck during a Border Patrol search at a port of entry.
“This rescue also highlights the dangers of keeping monkeys as pets — while they may seem manageable as infants, they often become dangerous and difficult to care for as they mature,” Joe Montisano, the El Paso Zoo Director told KVIA. Dr. Victoria Milne, the zoo veterinarian, says the animals were turned over to El Paso Zoo, and their staff did a full exam, feeding them every 4 hours.
“People will pay tens of thousands of dollars for them but they grow up mal-adjusted to human life. They’re not little people, they are monkeys and they need to be living with other monkeys,” Dr. Milne said in a video interview with the City of El Paso. “They don’t make great pets, they can be very dangerous, they can carry a lot of diseases and they can get our diseases.”
Smuggling exotic animals has grown in popularity recently along the Texas border. From January 2020 to September 11, 2023, more than 85% of exotic animal seizures made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service happened in our state, per Texas Monthly.
In June, veterinarians at the Gladys Porter Zoo in the border town of Brownsville had to bring in more staff and incubators to keep up with the number of rescued baby monkeys. Since March, they’ve gotten 18 infant rescued Mexican spider monkeys and a howler monkey, according to the Border Report.
Once the infant monkeys recovered in El Paso, the zoo gave them back to the Mexican Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection.
