A rhesus macaque at a research facility.
Credit...Kathleen Flynn/Reuters

A Door Is Unlocked, and 43 Monkeys Make a Bid for Freedom

Dozens of rhesus macaques escaped a research facility in South Carolina. They’re still on the lam.

by · NY Times

A caretaker entered an enclosure at a research center in South Carolina on Wednesday, cleaning the space and feeding the 50 rhesus monkeys inside. But on leaving, she failed to latch the double doors behind her.

Forty-three monkeys saw a rare chance at freedom and took it, racing out of the enclosure.

“It’s kind of like follow-the-leader — one goes out and there’s, like, a mad dash,” said Greg Westergaard, the chief executive of Alpha Genesis, which runs the research center.

Now officials in the surrounding town of Yemassee, roughly 60 miles west of Charleston, are urging residents to close their doors and windows, and to avoid interacting with the animals.

Gregory Alexander, the town’s chief of police, said the monkeys were not likely to be aggressive toward humans — they are “very young females” who each weigh less than 10 pounds. The group is also too young to undergo clinical testing at the research center, so they don’t pose any infectious disease threat to humans, Mr. Westergaard said.

Officials have laid out traps with fresh fruit and vegetables, which are typically effective since the domesticated animals struggle to find food in the wild, Mr. Alexander said.

Mr. Westergaard said a group of escapees was discovered on Thursday at the very edge of the research center’s property, but workers have not been able to capture them.

For the most part, nearby residents have been unfazed by the loose monkeys, said David Paul Murray, a town council member. This is not the first time animals have escaped the Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center, which sits on about 100 acres and houses about 7,000 monkeys for scientific research.

But this is the largest group to break out in recent history. It has happened often enough, Mr. Murray said, that it has become a comical part of the town’s lore — some locals will even set food outside for the monkeys.

“We’re not strangers to seeing monkeys randomly,” he said. “It’s something you don’t really think about until one runs across the road and you’re like, wait, what?”

(Mr. Westergaard quibbled with that characterization, noting that many townspeople who believe they have seen a monkey have in fact seen a squirrel.)

In 2014, 26 macaques escaped their enclosure and were recaptured within two days. A week later, a primate escaped while being moved to the medical clinic and “disappeared into the woods,” according to documents from federal regulators.

The next year, two macaques broke out of their outdoor chain-link enclosure — one was lured back inside, and the other died shortly after its recapture.

Nineteen monkeys scaled the 12-foot walls of their enclosure in 2016, using a protruding wall as a foothold, according to The State newspaper.

The Department of Agriculture fined the company more than $12,000 in 2017 in part because of failures to contain the animals.

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