Comments On: Bringing Up Ziggy

Bring Up Ziggy by Andrea Camobell part 1
introducion
"Some kid," I say aloud to myself and laugh. Bending down, I press my face up against the cold blue bars and ask for a kiss. The monkey baby inside complies by slipping her tongue out and bussing my lips. I love this imp. Never have I had such affection from the procession of dogs and cats whose short lives enriched my childhood. This monkey girl we named Ziggy will live about thirty to forty years, and that fact makes me content. Longevity is fitting in a creature so loving.
I hear a crick-crack-crick as she pushes the lever on what looks like a remote control dressed in primary colors. It's a baby toy, safe for infant mouths and tiny hands. There are more sophisticated toys in the seven-foot-tall cage: a Fisher-Price busy box, a baby tyke's spinner, an empty plastic 2-liter Coke bottle with a clothes pin inside for clatter. Toys for a baby with a higher level of learning.
This young primate, not unlike her human brothers, will be raised to adult age, and then will go off into the world to be trained for her life's tasks. She does not really belong to me, and there is the ache. Ziggy is part of an organization that is much bigger than the both of us; she is a Helping Hands monkey. She will become the working arms and legs of a quadriplegic, someone who lives in a wheelchair and cannot move his own limbs. Monkeys like Ziggy live with foster families until they are a good age to be trained by Helping Hands to be aides and companions to wheelchair-bound people.
Quadriplegics are often the victims of a spinal-related injury, like Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman. He was thrown from a horse. Now he is trapped in an uncooperative body and must depend on others for most everything: being fed, getting washed and dressed, having his teeth brushed, and coping with day after day spent in a wheelchair.
Like Reeve, the people who receive Helping Hands monkeys face new challenges in accomplishing, the everyday activities most people take for granted. Monkeys help not only with daily tasks but also with filling many long hours with meaning. If you could spend the day with Rett and his monkey Spencer, you would see two devoted companions. When Rett is in his wheelchair, Spencer, his monkey helper, rides on his shoulders. When he is in bed, Spencer curls up on Rett's pillow next to his head, wanting to be close to his "Dad." That's why monkeys are such good helpers. When they bond with the quadriplegic, they will spend hours loving their owners and doing simple tasks for them.
Raising a monkey is hard work. I volunteered for this. I chose to become attached to this unique monkey-child. Life before Ziggy was not as interesting. I was not as committed.
In entering into this unique arrangement, I knew I had a lot to learn: What do capuchins eat? Where would she sleep? What about diapers? But what I didn't realize then was that the lessons I'd learn along the way went far beyond the ins-and-outs of daily life with a monkey. This is not a story of monkey mischief and furry faux pas, though we have had our share of those. During our extraordinary adventure together, Ziggy has taught me unexpected lessons about love, commitment, and, ultimately, sacrifice. Observing her growth and behavior, along with studying other primate species, has enhanced my understanding of both animal and human nature. The loftiest ideas still spring from man's genius, but we can all learn a thing or two from the monkeys.
This book is a collection of observations and events in our lives, ,interlaced with accounts of other primates I have met or read about. Rather than recount our tale in a chronological by-the-numbers format, I have fashioned it more like a scrapbook, with cherished memories juxtaposed against the musings they inspired and flights of fancy offsetting some more serious episodes. The other members of the family have also recorded their impressions for posterity, making this a real family effort.
Brad and Trouble
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Bring Up Ziggy by Andrea Camobell part 2
This is our story. Ziggy was born at Discovery Island in Walt Disney World and came to us at five weeks old. I , am the only mother she knows.
Gotta love me
It's a dirty trick to introduce everyday observation into an argument.
UNKNOWN
This "monkey see, monkey do" business is vastly overrated. Ziggy is ten years old now and possesses many capabilities, but imitating me or what I demonstrate to her is not her only priority. She just wants things.
Right now I'm amused by her wanting to participate in the little middling chores of personal human maintenance. If I have a Q-tip, she needs a Q-tip. If I brush my teeth, she wants a toothbrush--to eat paste. This year she started to file her own nails and she makes gimme noises when I pull out the emery board and she has no tools of her own. So I started giving up a nail file every time I do mine, and I watch.
She seems happy working, scraping away against the rough board, sanding down nails on both fingers and toes. Of course she knows what to do with it; she's watched me a hundred times. She runs her nails against it and licks off the powdery dust. File, lick, file lick. Think manicures are only for people? Then, when the sand is, gone from the paper, she breaks it in half and the job is done.
Even being the sentimentalist I am, I don't believe I taught her that. She would have done it without the demonstration. In any event, let's not for a moment consider her for a job as manicurist. Her threshold of boredom is too short for good service. Plus, creating hangnails by picking at my cuticles bit by bit is one of her favorite pastimes.
Good grooming aside, along the way I learned there are some other, more important lessons that primates can teach each other.
Cebus monkeys--Ziggy's Latin name is Cebus apella--have large brains for their body size. Their tool use, foraging strategies, and what could only be called deception, suggest that they are more intelli, gent than most other animals. There is no other way to put it: Primates are fairly brilliant. And this is not a story about your usual dog or cat scenario unless you know of a cat who uses sign language or a dog who likes to draw on the sides of its cage with chalk.
I'm going to take the hard, unpopular line between animal and behavioral study and tell you I have learned lessons about certain aspects of human life and its illusions from a monkey--a "stepdown" primate who has always been represented on the evolutionary tree as an underling, a lesser of man. Most scientists frown upon this concept, which is referred to as anthropomorphism--giving human characteristics such as emotion, consciousness, thought, and motivation to a nonhuman, an animal. But then, we as an order--a category of organisms--are labeled "human primates," and I have an embarrassing story to tell you about men of science that renders their judgment questionable, at least in my eyes.
Would you believe that as recently as the 1980s, it was routine to perform surgery on infants without anesthesia, using only paralytic dulling agents? Today we'd call that truancy from good common sense, but then it was believed that babies' immature nervous systems were impervious to pain! This outdated, commonly held belief is just one example of how a systematic medical disregard for what others feel can occur. Such insensitivity is not one of the. qualities I would care to ascribe to any primate.
Brad and Trouble
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Bring Up Ziggy by Andrea Campbell part 3
IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE
Scientists believe that studies of monkeys have contributed significantly to our understanding of attachment and nurturing behavior in humans. Some of these studies, though, have taken on cruel, somewhat tortured parameters. Psychologist Harry Harlow performed a series of experiments in which infant rhesus monkeys were raised with artificial mothers made up like wire figures. Some had soft covers and attachments for feeding bottles; some did not.
A report of Harlow's study states, "Harlow then tested infants in mildly fear-provoking situations analogous to those that.evoke attachment responses in human children to see if the presence of the artificial mother alleviated the infant's distress." In other words, he scared the bejeezus out of them to see if they clung to their mothers for comfort or if their attachment was strictly one of survival, because she was the source of feeding.
Harlow's work showed that a baby monkey's need was primarily one of comfort and that closeness to the mother figure soothed the infant in fear-provoking situations. The report goes on to say, ". . . for ethical reasons some experiments simply cannot be performed on humans." The fact that inherently cruel techniques like this, intended only to prove a point, are deemed necessary at all baffles the mind. I could have told Harlow what he wanted to know.
Because part of the definition of the word lesson reads "something, usually unpleasant, which serves as a warning or example," we should not ignore the often offensive and wayward incentives of men and women simply because it shames us to think of these actions as human. We cannot ignore the basic emotions as demonstrated by all primates. So while we are mapping out which gene makes us fat and what kind of DNA strand fans a disease like cancer, we have to consider our motives. When you take up the red pencil and examine the historical script of life, it's only then that you can realize that we have the uncut, rough drafts of actual life, and we are still not certain how primate behavior plays a part in it; and that understanding our motives is vital to growth, maturity, and change.
BECOMING THE MONKEY LADY
To tell you why I have a monkey it would be helpful to explain my state of mind at the time and the chain of events that led to getting one. For this weave to trip back to the summer of 1986. I was thirty-seven years old, wife to a husband the same age, and mother to two boys, ages six and nine. We had just had a foreign exchange daughter graduate from. high school and she was on her way back to Holland when a personal tragedy struck me down.
A rare form of tumor was discovered growing in the jawbone under my left ear and lodged almost to the middle of my chin. Procedures theretofore unknown to me would alter a life I had come to believe was fairly comfortable and active, turning the next four years into hell. The diseased part was cut out and replaced with my own "ilium" (hip bone), which eventually broke from the stress and, subsequently, after two and a half years of orthodontia, was replaced with pieces from my own skull.
It seemed to me throughout this interminably long time that I was always either recovering from a surgery or waiting for another to take place. As MY life volleyed between adrenaline and urgency and grief and boredom, it made a minor career singing in a dinner club no longer possible. So What, I asked myself, would I do?
It is during times of crisis that most of us take stock and reevaluate our lives. It was no different for me. I felt I needed to somehow try to milk some happiness out of this setback. My choices were binary: recuperate and create work . . . or not. Unfortunately, the area I lived in was not ripe with entrepreneurial opportunities, especially for--someone with limited parameters--my mouth was wired shut for up to ten weeks at a time and there were frequent trips to Dallas, every six weeks, for two and a half years-so what would I do?
Brad and Trouble
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Bring Up Ziggy by Andrea Campbell part 4
Eventually, the obligatory doctor's visits dwindled down to none. "Go home," they said, "we're done." And after a six-year stint of placing foreign exchange students petered out, I decided to get a real job, something I could do as an at-home cottage industry, and still remain close to bed and the comfort needed for recuperating. So I began to write.
After tons of rejections, some less than well-paid articles, and the unscripted dues all writers have to pay, I eventually found a niche writing career profiles for educational magazines. I was good at explaining a "day in the life," for interested high school students and would be no news reports of mothers who leave their infant children in the car in the grueling heat, resulting in needless tragedy. (I thought everyone knows it is not wise to leave a dog in a car in the summereven with the window cracked-much less a baby!) Another highly questionable idea is that mothers become nurturing caregivers simply because they possess all the correct emotional and physical attributes requied for the job. Furthermore, the assumption that fathers will feel responsibility for offspring because they've fathered them, is, unfortunately, not always the case, as demonstrated by the thousands of "deadbeat dads" who refuse to pay child support for separated children.
Spock tells us that parents don't really learn how to care for children from books and lectures, "though these may have value in answering specific questions and doubts." Referring to literature versus experience, he writes that parents "learned the basics from the way they themselves were handled while they were children." He goes on to explain that our childhood games such as playing house and caring for Barbie and Ken were our ways of practicing what we'd been taught by our own parents and how we'd felt about them. In other words, parenting is best demonstrated.
Getting firsthand information about the parenting job is important: babysit, carry babies, read about babies, borrow a baby, or hang around a new mother. Childcare education should be an indispensable component of our society, not simply because you have to let the commitment of parenting seep into your soul but because babies are high-maintenance people and, once arrived, the process never ends. Ziggy was no different. This was definitely not a pet.
From my own perspective gained from raising Ziggy and studying research done with other primates, I've learned a new set of tricks about mothering that I had not mastered in raising two boys, now young adults, or during the temporary care of two foreign exchange daughters, now young women. Because Monkey Handling is not a course I took in college, and because I'd never had any exposure to a monkey nor to anyone who did, nor did 1 even know of anyone who had, I entered into surrogacy with some trepidation. And for good reason-it's not your usual pet situation.
Even though I'd never been closer to a monkey than the cages poised a mere sixty feet away at the zoo, I'd always had an abiding love of nature and a desire to nurture. So what could go wrong? I learned to trust in myself and in the love that can come from years of working at being a giving parent.
I can still recall my children's excitement at the prospect. One night at a family caucus I asked them, "How would you like to be a foster family?" My oldest, not quite sold on sharing amenities with another exchange student so soon after the last one had left, piped up, "What country are they from?" When I responded that it was for a monkey, there was an enthusiastic response.
At times I still marvel at what an air bubble of an idea it was, and I can honestly say that even now we are still challenged by the fact that we've invited a monkey into our family of large pink people. Raising a monkey requires a kind of persistence we had forgotten we needed, now that our own children were older.
Brad and Trouble
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Bring Up Ziggy by Andrea Campbell can be purchased at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580630855/qid=973763277/sr=1-33/102-6682756-8911348
Brad and Trouble
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who is ziggy

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dear hooever idfvfthfruyftdrdr
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Wow

I have read all of these messages on ziggy and when I got to the end I wonder were the rest of your stories were I just was so sad to come to the end. I never knew that you could a monkey could be part of a family, my only questions now is this is this monkey still with your family and do you have a picture of her? I can see her doing her nails! lol
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