Run, Monkey, Run

This is just a brilliant and uplifting story. A wild monkey from a small colony of wild monkeys in America has taken up residency in the city of Tampa, and the authorities are trying to catch him. The citizens of Tampa want the monkey to be free. The New York Times has a massive feature on the monkey…

Image Credit: This is actually the monkey, from the NY Times story.

And on it went, with the monkey zigging and zagging around Tampa Bay, dodging the government agencies bent on capturing it. The state considers the animal a potential danger to humans and, like all invasive species, an illegitimate and maybe destructive part of Florida’s ecology. But the public came to see the monkey as an outlaw, a rebel — a nimble mascot for “good, old-fashioned American freedom,” as one local reporter put it…

Sightings were seldom reported now. As a woman on Coquina Key named Rosalie Broten told me: “Nobody wants the monkey to be captured. Everybody wants it to be free.”

The citizenry of Tampa Bay was adamantly pro-monkey. People had long been abetting the animal, leaving fruit plates on their patios. A few people, one F.W.C. officer told me, called the agency’s monkey hot line to report that they’d seen the macaque several hours or even a couple of days earlier — offering totally useless intelligence, in other words, presumably just to stick their thumbs in the government’s eye.

It has been at large for ages… and plays very hard to get…

Since 2009, Yates estimates that he has gone after the animal on roughly 100 different occasions. The monkey was his white whale. He claimed to have darted it at least a dozen times, steadily upping the tranquilizer dosage, to no avail. The animal is too wily — it retreats into the woods and sleeps off the drug. A few times, the monkey stared Yates right in the eye and pulled the dart out.

Go monkey.