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| Monkey Business |
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Walking around the monkey house at Edinburgh Zoo you cannot help but notice three new arrivals, chief amongst them the two month old L’hoest's monkey clinging to its mother.
Lorna Hughes, primate keeper at Edinburgh Zoo, told The Student, “Everything is going very well. At the moment it is still a little too early for us to check whether it is a baby boy or a baby girl because a baby this young stays close to its mum.”
Fellow primate keeper Dawn Nicoll added, “She’s too pretty to be a boy. When this one was born she would spend all her day sleeping and suckling. She would look around and pick things up but still hold onto the female. Usually it’s a slow progression but that wee one is quite confident so it’s purely based on the individual.”
Usually, as long as the adult monkeys are not stressed they will breed without any veterinary assistance. The zoo allows the mother to take care of her baby so the females can become independent, established females, and they only intervene if the baby is injured.
When the primates are older they are given training that provides mental stimuli such as touching targets and presenting hands or feet in return for treats, which makes veterinary examination easier and human contact less stressful.
The baby can expect to live about thirty years, much longer than his wild relatives in central Africa – whose survival in the bush has been made tougher in recent years due to habitat loss and poachers hunting monkeys for meat. L’hoest's are classified as vulnerable on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
While the mountainous forests that wild L’hoest's call their home are far away from the monkey house at Edinburgh Zoo, conservation efforts undertaken at zoos across the world are central to the healthy survival of the species. Newer news items:
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