Gerald Durrell - Menagerie Manor

On acquiring new animals, one of the many problems that face you is the process of settling them in, for until they have learned to look upon their new cage as home, and have also learned to trust you, they are uneasy. There are many different ways of making animals feel at home, and these vary according to the species. Sometimes special titbits have to be given, so that the animal forgets its fear of you in its eagerness for the food. You may have to provide highly nervous creatures with a box in which they can hide, or cover the front of the crate with sacking until they have decided that you mean them no harm. There are times when the most extraordinary methods have to be used to give an animal confidence, and the trouble we had with Topsy was a case in point.

I was in an animal dealer’s shop in the north of England one cold winter’s day, looking around to see if he had anything interesting I could buy for the zoo. As I walked round the shop I suddenly noticed a very dank, dark cage in one corner, and peering at me from between the bars was one of the most pathetic little faces I had ever seen. It was coal-black, with large, lustrous eyes that seemed to be perpetually full of tears. The fur surrounding this face was reddish-brown, short, and thick, like the pile on an expensive carpet. I looked closer and saw that the face belonged to a baby woolly monkey, one of the most charming of the South American primates. This one could not have been more than a few weeks old, and was far too young to have been separated from its mother. It crouched miserably on the floor of the cage, shivering and coughing, its nose streaming, its fur matted and tangled with filth. From the condition and smell of the cage I could see that it had enteritis as well as a cold which looked as though it was bordering on pneumonia. It was not an animal that anyone in his right senses would contemplate buying. But then it peered up at me with its great, dark eyes filled with despair, and I was lost. I asked the dealer how much he wanted for the baby. He said that he would not dream of selling it to me, as I was a good customer and the baby was sure to die. I replied that I realized the animal was a bad risk, but that if he would let me have it I would pay him if it lived, but not if it died. Rather reluctantly he agreed to this. We bundled the plaintively squealing baby into a box full of straw, and I hurried back to Jersey with it. I knew that unless it was treated rapidly it would die, and already it might well be too late.

On my return to Jersey, we put the baby, which someone christened Topsy into a warm cage and examined her. First, I realized she would have to have antibiotic and vitamin injections to combat the enteritis and the cold. Secondly, her thick fur, matted with her own excreta, would have to be cleaned, for if it was left in that state she could develop a skin rash and eventually lose all her fur. Our chief problem, though, was how to get Topsy to allow us to do these things. Most baby monkeys will, within a matter of hours, take to a human foster parent, and they are generally no trouble at all. As Topsy’s experience of human beings had obviously been of the worst possible kind, she threw herself in fits of screaming hysterics (as only a woolly monkey can) if we so much as opened the door of her cage. To manhandle her was, therefore, going to do more harm than good, and yet she had to have treatment or die. Then we had a brainwave: if Topsy would not accept us as foster parents, would she accept something else? How about a teddy bear? We were all a bit doubtful about this, but we had to try something, and so we obtained one. The bear had a pleasant if slightly vacuous expression, and was just about the size that Topsy’s mother would be, so we put it in the cage and awaited results. At first, Topsy would not go near it, but at last her curiosity got the better of her and she touched it. As soon as she discovered that it was cuddly and furry, she took to it, and soon was clinging to it with a fierce, possessive passion that was quite touching.

Now, a complete change came over Topsy. As long as she was clinging to her teddy bear with arms, legs, and tail, she lost her fear of human beings. We simply lifted the bear out of the cage with Topsy stuck to it, like a limpet, and she would allow us to do what we liked. We were thus able to inject her and clean up her matted fur, and within a few days she was well on the road to recovery, and looked like a different monkey. But then came another problem: as the days passed, the teddy bear became more and more unhygienic, until finally we decided he would have to be removed from Topsy’s cage to be washed and disinfected. So, to Topsy’s extreme annoyance, we removed the bear. Immediately she threw a screaming fit. Of all the monkey family, the woolly monkeys have the most powerful and excruciating scream you have ever heard, a scream that goes through you and makes your blood run cold, like the screech of a knife on a plate, magnified a million times. We blocked our ears, and consoled ourselves with the thought that she would stop in about ten minutes when she realized that she was not going to have her bear back, but Topsy did not stop. She screamed solidly all morning, and by lunch-time our nerves were in shreds. There was only one thing to do: we took the van and rushed down into the town and, after visiting several toy-shops, managed to buy a teddy bear closely resembling Topsy’s original one. Then we hurried back to the zoo and stuffed it hastily into Topsy’s cage. She stopped in mid-scream, gave a loud squeak of joy, and flung herself on to the new teddy bear. She wrapped her arms, legs, and tail lightly round it and immediately fell into a deep and exhausted sleep. After that, the teddy bears took turns; while one was being washed, the other one took over the duties of foster mother, and this arrangement Topsy found eminently satisfactory.

At last Topsy grew so big that she was bigger than her teddy bears, and we decided that we would have to wean her off them, as it were, for eventually she would have to go into a big cage with other woolly monkeys, and she could not take her bears with her. It was time, we felt, that she grew used to the idea of having a companion in the cage with her, and so we chose a large ginger guinea-pig of placid disposition and no brain. He was introduced into Topsy’s cage, and at first she ignored him, except when he went too near to her precious bear, whereupon she would clout him. It was not long, however, before Topsy discovered that the guinea-pig had one great advantage over the bear as a sleeping companion—it had built-in central heating.

The guinea-pig—whom we now called Harold for con­venient reference—took, I think, a rather dim view of all this. To begin with, if he possessed a thought in his head at all, that thought was food. Harold’s life-work was to test the edibility of everything with which he came in contact, and he did not like having his life’s work mucked about by a domineering woolly monkey. Topsy, on the other hand, had very strict ideas about the correct time to get up, go to bed, play, and so on, and she did not see why she should have to change these to fit in with Harold’s feeding habits. It seemed to Harold that no sooner had he found a respectable piece of carrot, or something, than Topsy would decide it was bedtime, and he was seized by the hind leg and hauled off to their box of straw, in the most undignified manner. Here, to add insult to injury, Topsy would climb on to his back, wrap her arms, legs, and tail tightly round him to prevent his escape, and sink into a deep sleep, looking like an outsize jockey on a small and rotund ginger horse.

Another thing that Harold found disquieting was Topsy’s firm conviction that, if given the opportunity, he would be able to leap about in the branches with the same agility that she herself displayed. She was sure that if only she could get him up into the branches he would turn out to be a splendid climber, but the job was to lift Harold off the ground. She could spare only one hand to hold him with, and he was fat, heavy, and uncooperative. She would, after considerable effort, tuck him under one arm and then start to climb, but before she was more than a few inches up the wire Harold would slip out from under her arm and plop back to the floor of the cage. Poor Harold—I think he suffered a great deal at Topsy’s hands, but he served our purpose, for very soon Topsy had forgotten all about her teddy bears, and was able to take her place in the big cage with the rest of the woolly monkeys. Harold was returned to the guinea-pig pen, where he spends all day up to his knees in vegetables, champing his way through them with grim determination.