some of <\/a>their teeth removed, and were trained using shocks. Yet Helping Hands endured until it rebranded in 2023.<\/p>\n\u201cI was looking for that journalistic piece to say \u2018this is a media creation\u2019, and [that article] didn\u2019t exist,\u201d she says. \u201cSo I\u2019m like: OK, well, I should write it then.\u201d<\/p>\n
Photograph: Carrie McLaren<\/p>\n
That led to Ape Sh*t, whose first issue tells the \u201cmessy, complicated\u201d story of the nonprofit\u2019s founding, its struggle to place monkeys, and the adoring international media coverage. The lengthy tale of the organization, which received federal funding, is peppered with interstitial material, including a darkly comic guide to keeping \u201ca terrible idea alive (\u2018problem: all monkeys bite. Solution: remove their teeth\u2019)\u201d and quotes from past congressional testimony opposing funding for the group: \u201cMany quadriplegics have trachea tubes that are easily accessible to the monkeys,\u201d noted one critic. \u201cIn addition, all have urine bags that can be opened by the monkeys. Driving controls on the quadriplegics\u2019 wheelchairs have been used by monkeys to drive their owners into walls.\u201d<\/p>\n
The zine\u2019s first issue includes an interview with Alison Pascoe, a former monkey trainer at Helping Hands who has become a critic of the organization. She describes the shock treatment used to train the monkeys and her concern that Helping Hands was fueling enthusiasm for keeping monkeys as pets. She discusses how the female monkeys, who would go into heat every month, had to have hysterectomies; a monkey she adopted, Amelia, would \u201chand me scissors\u201d to push her to remove the bandage from her operation.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Envisioning Access, formerly Helping Hands, wrote that it \u201crespects Ms McLaren\u2019s right to her own thoughts and opinions. However, we stand by the deep human-animal bonds that we have witnessed over almost half a century between recipients and their service monkeys.\u201d The organization added that it recognized \u201cthat what was considered acceptable care for primates in the 1970s and 80s has evolved over the decades as we have learned more about these amazing animals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of many reasons why the last monkey was born into our program in 1999, and why we are committed to the support and care of every monkey in the program through their natural lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n
The zine also explores the history of organ grinders in a series of blurbs and pictures. Monkeys, McLaren writes, would often bite the impoverished children who gave them coins. They\u2019d also climb buildings, leading to accidents including when \u201ca man in Newark accidentally shot a neighbor when trying to gun down a monkey climbing a building\u201d; in other cases, kids fell out windows trying to hand pennies to the monkeys.<\/p>\n
Photograph: Carrie McLaren<\/p>\n
An excerpt from an interview with an organ grinder trainer describes how to \u201cbreak the monkey\u2019s spirit by rendering it entirely helpless\u201d using \u201cropes or gags \u2026 a state of weakness and depression ensues, all resistance ceases.\u201d A \u201cswitch\u201d is also \u201cbrought into play\u201d. Organ grinders \u201cordinarily\u201d kill five to ten monkeys before finding one who can endure the lifestyle, according to the excerpt.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, they get revenge. A 1952 account describes Gloria the capuchin punishing her owner for a long absence by unlocking a bookcase, taking all the pages out of a pair of books, and dumping them in a fish tank. In 2007, a New York Times story described a monkey named Oliver repeatedly breaking out of a cage at a Mississippi zoo; it took him 20 minutes to evade \u201c$300 worth of new locks\u201d. In 2001, the Chicago Tribune described a monkey who would \u201cgrab perfume bottles and empty them into his hands and rub all over himself\u201d. He also enjoyed running around with a knife and waving it in a kid\u2019s face.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not all mayhem and cruelty. The zine closes with a palate cleanser focused on capuchins in the wild, including research on their behavior and photography.<\/p>\n
McLaren became interested in the relationship between humans and monkeys after stumbling on a book at a thrift shop by Leonard Williams, founder of a celebrated monkey sanctuary in Cornwall, southwestern England, about his interactions with the animals. Her interest in the topic led to the listserv and later to researching the history of pet monkeys and Helping Hands.<\/p>\n
Ape Sh*t\u2019s text and layout are almost entirely McLaren\u2019s, though several friends helped with the editing process, including collaborators from her 90s zine. Of course, things have changed since then, when a 1,000-copy print run would sell out immediately. \u201cPeople aren\u2019t used to going picking up a paper artifact and thumbing through that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Still, small, homemade zines are \u201calive and well\u201d. \u201cI follow the zines subreddit, and there\u2019s just so many creative, amazing zines that people are doing,\u201d McLaren says. She\u2019s also planning to put new effort into a digital format, beyond a simple PDF. And while this is by no means a full-time job, she hopes that the user-friendly approach to telling a story can serve as a classroom teaching tool, as was the case with her earlier work. \u201cI try to use humor and clear language to express complex ideas,\u201d she says \u2013 in this case, our species\u2019 strange relationship with some of our closest relatives.<\/p>\n
McLaren acknowledges that \u201canimal rights is a dirty word\u201d in America. \u201cThere\u2019s an assumption that if you want to advocate for animals, that you\u2019re some kind of crazy person who\u2019s gonna throw a bucket of blood on everyone,\u201d she says. But \u201cpart of the fun\u201d of writing Ape Sh*t is \u201ctrying to look at ways that animals \u2013 monkeys and apes specifically \u2013 have tried to communicate to us that they are individuals, that they are beings with perspective\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zines have always lent themselves to weird and wonderful topics, from sci-fi reflections to punk fanzines to radical…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-624407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}