Last November, the day after the election, Daniel Vance was eating lunch in his truck when he noticed something move in the trees across the road. The forecast had predicted thunderstorms in the rural town of Yemassee, South Carolina, where Vance, a land surveyor, was mapping sewage lines. Taking another bite of his foot-long sub, he figured that it must be the wind picking up. Then he saw the monkeys. Dozens of them were streaming over a tall metal fence at a compound owned by Alpha Genesis, one of the country’s biggest breeders of primates used in scientific experiments. Swinging from the overhanging branches and darting through the woods, the animals were heading toward a nearby housing project, their pink faces lit with glee.
Fearing that they could be carrying disease, Vance called Alpha Genesis. Within minutes, a Code X—for escape—was triggered, and a recapture mission was under way. Alpha Genesis employees set out fruit-baited traps; the Yemassee Police Department deployed thermal-imaging cameras. Residents were advised to shut their windows and to dial 911 if they spotted a fugitive. The police chief began to field tips about simian sightings as far away as Florida. Most of these informants, he found, had trouble distinguishing between monkeys and squirrels.
In an unsettled nation eager for diversion, news of the escape went viral. The Daily Mail posted video dispatches from the perimeter of the Alpha Genesis facility, while late-night hosts provided updates about the primates who had voted with their feet. On Saturday, Vance was interviewed by Pete Hegseth on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” which played a short clip of the breakout that Vance had captured with his phone. By the time he returned to work the next week, cop cars and news vans roamed the streets, as though an actual jailbreak had occurred. “I felt like I was in a Kafka story,” Vance told me, “where everything keeps getting more absurd.” The town’s resident graphic designer started printing T-shirts with a monkey above the slogan “STRAIGHT OUTTA YEMASSEE.” When they sold out in days, she expanded into coffee mugs and champagne flutes.
Yemassee (population 1,080) is home to four times as many monkeys as humans. About four thousand live at Alpha Genesis’s main campus, which locals call the Monkey Farm. Another three thousand reside at a separate facility, in a neighboring county up the road. On Morgan Island, off the coast of South Carolina, the company also manages a free-range breeding colony of thirty-seven hundred monkeys for the National Institutes of Health. Alpha Genesis ships many of its primates to labs across the country, though it also conducts experiments on site: testing for pharmaceutical companies; fetal-alcohol research for Washington University in St. Louis; Zika-vaccine studies led by Harvard Medical School.
There were forty-three runaways, part of a troop of roughly fifty that had recently arrived in Yemassee from the Morgan Island colony. All were rhesus macaques, a species known for its deep communal bonds and larkish intelligence. Found in cities and jungles throughout Asia, macaques form intricate matrilineal societies and display a keen sense of fairness. At one crowded temple in Bali, they not only pilfer jewelry, sunglasses, and cellphones from tourists to ransom in exchange for food; they also understand which of these items will fetch them better meals, guarding their loot until their mark coughs up the appropriate bounty.
After their escape, the Yemassee macaques stayed close to the facility, snatching at the apples that surrounded the traps and cooing at the troop members who remained behind the fence. Greg Westergaard, the C.E.O. of Alpha Genesis, described these antics as an amusing sideshow. Animal-rights advocates suggested otherwise. “Macaques are the marines of monkeys, because they never leave a man behind,” Lisa Jones-Engel, a primatologist and senior science adviser at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), told me. “They could have followed the woods and ended up in a rhesus nirvana. What kills me is they were crying for their friends and daughters to come with them.”
November 6, 2024, was not the first attempt at a primate Independence Day in Yemassee. At least sixty-seven other monkeys, in eleven separate incidents, have escaped from their cages at Alpha Genesis in the past decade. What made the recent exodus different was not just its scale but its political timing. Groups that oppose animal testing, historically the province of liberals and progressives, were in the process of forging a delicate alliance with the incoming Trump Administration. An estimated third of the forty-eight-billion-dollar budget of the N.I.H. goes toward funding animal research—and animal protectionists, Make America Healthy Again adherents, and anti-establishment libertarians were realizing that they shared a desire to see that budget slashed.
For all of these camps, the fracas at Alpha Genesis offered a new occasion to denounce the waste of taxpayer dollars on unseemly animal experiments. Since 2008, the company has received more than a hundred and twenty million dollars in government contracts, including nineteen million last year from the N.I.H. alone. In December, 2021, the Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace held a floating press conference off the shore of Morgan Island, which lies in her district. Standing on the deck of a powerboat, Mace told reporters that the G.O.P.’s fledgling interest in the fate of laboratory animals was bringing together “the QAnon side of the Party and the socialist squad.” After November’s escape, Mace called for a congressional briefing, describing the incident as “the latest in a long list of violations,” and spoke to Westergaard, the Alpha Genesis C.E.O. “He tried to tell me how good the primates have it at his facility,” she said to ABC News. “And my response was, they have it good until you kill them with disease.”
Westergaard, who has an austere face, deep-set blue eyes, and a head of gray hair, remembered their conversation differently. Mace, he said, had offered her support and “recognized the economic importance of our company to the people of the Lowcountry.” The region was once dominated by slave plantations; during the two World Wars, Yemassee was best known for its train depot, which welcomed marine recruits on their way to basic training. Today, many residents depend on the Monkey Farm for their livelihood. They work there, or they have family members who do, or they feed its employees. At lunchtime, especially on paydays, the local mini-mart is packed with Alpha Genesis staff. So is the liquor store.
The one-traffic-light town teemed with rumors about how the escape had happened. “It was either an intentional act or the product of extreme incompetence, because, unless a wall falls down, there are so many safeguards in place,” a former Alpha Genesis supervisor told me. The macaques were secured by three gates, each fastened by two sets of locks and latches. At first, Westergaard blamed the breach on an employee who had accidentally left them open and walked off the job. Then he said that he couldn’t rule out the possibility of sabotage.
Until the twentieth century, primates were considered too big, feral, and expensive for most experiments; researchers favored guinea pigs, frogs, rabbits, and dogs. That changed in 1908, when two Viennese scientists—having failed to infect the usual animals with polio—transferred cells taken from a stricken nine-year-old boy into a baboon and a rhesus macaque. Both experienced symptoms, with the macaque losing control of his legs. At least a million monkeys died in the race to develop vaccines for polio, which had previously paralyzed thousands of children each year.
Buoyed by this success, Congress established a series of primate research centers in the nineteen-sixties, hoping that our closest living relatives might help solve other medical mysteries, from Alzheimer’s to Zika. Monkeys have since been central to efforts to transplant organs (and prevent their rejection), to refine treatments for diabetes, to understand the effects of lead poisoning and secondhand smoke, and to test immunotherapies for cancer. If you take Claritin or have an I.U.D., you’ve benefitted from primate research.
With their large hands and expressive, doleful faces, the great apes are often depicted as the poster children for experimentation. This is misleading. Macaques—who are smaller and more easily bred in captivity—are the most frequently used lab monkeys, and with the rise of tranquillizers and commercial air travel after the Second World War, they became far easier to obtain. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, India shipped hundreds of thousands of rhesus macaques to American labs. That trade was governed by a treaty stipulating that the monkeys could be used strictly for biomedical research. In the late seventies, an activist named Shirley McGreal, who’d recently founded the International Primate Protection League, learned that the U.S. military was quietly violating this agreement. Army researchers had been exposing macaques to lethal doses of nuclear radiation, placing them on treadwheels, and prodding them with electric shocks to keep them running until they died. McGreal launched a letter-writing campaign to Indian newspapers, prompting the country’s Prime Minister to permanently ban all primate exports to the United States. Bangladesh soon followed suit.
Worried that further vaccine development would stall, U.S. government scientists decided to invest in domestic breeding colonies, including the one on Morgan Island, which was established in 1979. It was eventually managed by Laboratory Animal Breeders & Services (LABS) of Virginia, a private company that also ran a primate facility in Yemassee. For decades, hundreds of Morgan Island’s juveniles have been rounded up and sent to Bethesda, Maryland, where they’ve been conscripted in the wars against H.I.V., malaria, and tuberculosis. “They had these big corrals on the island, and when it came time to send out shipments they would put a bunch of fruit inside, close the doors, and the little ones who jumped in would get captured,” Kathleen Conlee, who in the nineties worked for LABS of Virginia as a behavioral manager, told me. Conlee’s experience there prompted her to join the Humane Society of the United States, where she has worked ever since. “You’d hear their cries throughout the island, wailing for their moms,” she said. “I’ll never forget that sound as long as I live.”
Because newborn monkeys take a few years to reach the suitable age for experiments, facilities sometimes supplement their inventories. In 1997, McGreal’s International Primate Protection League received a tip about an Indonesian shipment of nursing macaques headed to Yemassee by way of Paris and Chicago. Importing monkeys to the United States for scientific research is legal, but importing nursing animals and unweaned infants is not. McGreal embarked on another impassioned epistolary campaign, this time addressed to U.S. government officials; again, it worked. In 2002, a federal grand jury indicted LABS of Virginia and three of its board members for smuggling. (The company eventually pleaded guilty to falsifying records and was fined half a million dollars, and the charges against the board members were dismissed.) As the case made its way through court, LABS’s research director, Greg Westergaard, purchased his beleaguered employer and renamed it Alpha Genesis.
Westergaard excelled at the two most important parts of the job: winning government contracts and keeping a low profile. The monkey business is dominated by a handful of highly secretive and rivalrous brokers. The biggest, such as Charles River Laboratories and Inotiv, are publicly traded companies that supply scientists with an array of animals. Others, like Alpha Genesis and Worldwide Primates, are family-run firms that deal exclusively in monkeys. “Sometimes it feels as though they’re all trying to eat one another alive,” Nick Atwood, the co-founder of a direct-action animal-rights group in Florida, told me. Atwood suspected that some of the best anonymous tips he’d received were from the founder of Worldwide Primates, Matthew Block, attempting to smear his adversaries. The company’s attorney, Paul Pelletier, said that this claim had “no truth whatsoever.”
The enmity that dealers harbor for one another is outmatched only by their shared hatred of activists. In 2014, Block called 911 about an envelope mailed to his late mother’s house in Miami which was filled with white powder and a note that read, in part, “YOU ARE THE LOWEST PIECE OF CRAP WALKING THE EARTH AND YOU DESERVE WHAT YOU DO TO HELPLESS MONKEYS EVERY DAY!” Block suggested that the letter came from activists associated with Atwood’s group, which had regularly protested outside his family’s homes—but, when the F.B.I. investigated the threat, it discovered Block’s own DNA on the seal strip. Block, who’d previously pleaded guilty to playing a role in the Bangkok Six, a smuggling case involving baby orangutans, was given five years of probation for intentionally conveying false information through the mail. (Pelletier, the attorney, said that Block has repeatedly expressed remorse for the incident.)
Unlike his more colorful competitors, Westergaard was quiet and aloof, according to two dozen current and former employees, though he sometimes lost his temper. “You never saw him, but if you were called into his office you were terrified,” one said. In the afternoons, Westergaard would ride his bicycle across the campus to hand out treats to his beloved tufted capuchins, who were widely considered the most spoiled monkeys on the property. Some of them, like Patty, he’d known since 1983, when he was an undergraduate majoring in psychology at San Diego State University. Others he was said to have brought over from the N.I.H., where he’d later worked as a researcher, studying the monkeys’ tool use and considerable artistic abilities. In a press release celebrating Patty’s thirty-seventh birthday, in 2020, Westergaard attributed the capuchin’s longevity to her sweet temperament and the care that she’d received at Alpha Genesis. “She still loves listening to the birds singing in the morning,” he said, “and she still believes the Rolling Stones are the greatest rock and roll band of all time.”
That spring, as scientists began to test treatments for COVID-19, demand for lab monkeys surged. China, which had become the biggest foreign supplier of monkeys to the United States, shut down exports around the time of the outbreak, and the ensuing shortage caused prices to quadruple, with breeders charging as much as twenty thousand dollars per macaque. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are a little more than a hundred thousand monkeys for research and teaching in the country; Westergaard was inundated with calls from scientists who were scrambling for more. In 2023, a committee assembled by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that, without greater investment in a strategic monkey reserve, the United States would struggle to combat future pandemics and to compete with China.
Yet plans to expand America’s lab-monkey stockpile have been met with fierce opposition. In the woodsy city of Bainbridge, in southwest Georgia, hunters, anti-vaxxers, and environmentalists have banded together to fight Safer Human Medicine, a newly formed company that has proposed transforming hundreds of acres of land into a breeding facility for up to thirty thousand monkeys. Seemingly eager to undercut the competition, Westergaard joined the pile-on; last fall, in a Facebook group called No Monkey Breeding Bainbridge, GA!, he posted that Safer Human Medicine was “very likely a front for another business entity,” whose backers were “possibly Chinese.” (A Safer Human Medicine spokesperson said that this was “categorically false” and lamented that “Dr. Westergaard has chosen to spread baseless rumors online, sowing confusion and fear.”) Ironically, it was the escape at Westergaard’s own business that dealt the Bainbridge activists their strongest hand. “I couldn’t go anywhere without people saying, Did you see what just happened in South Carolina?” Yvena Merritt, a Bainbridge seamstress and organizer, told me last December. “If we’re supposed to have thirty thousand, how many could get loose if that happens here?”
Westergaard tolerated the spotlight so long as the escape, which he’d described as “a little adventure,” was treated as just that. This narrative soon became difficult to sustain. Two weeks after the monkeys broke out, an overnight worker at Alpha Genesis noticed a group of long-tailed macaques lying on the ground inside one of the compound’s enclosures. A diesel heater, used to warm them on cold nights, had malfunctioned. Dozens were rushed to the facility’s clinic, where twenty-two were eventually pronounced dead. “Their eyes were closed, some had vomited, and others had diarrhea,” Leslie St. Ann, a senior veterinary technician who treated the animals, told me. “Some were seizing, and they died before I could euthanize them, the poor little things.” By morning, the heater was replaced, and the thermometer, which one employee said had reached at least a hundred and ten degrees, disappeared.
As scrutiny of Westergaard’s facility intensified, he descended into the self-dramatizing paranoia characteristic of exotic-wildlife dealers. He stopped responding to most journalists; he fired St. Ann, along with other employees whom he suspected of leaking to the press; and he told the Charleston Post and Courier that the heater-related fatalities might have been caused by “extremist activity.” In December, PETA released a trove of internal documents from Alpha Genesis that a whistle-blower had shared. The medical records, incident reports, photographs, and e-mails, which were collected between late 2020 and the summer of 2023, detailed a succession of gruesome injuries and deaths. In a public statement, Westergaard said that he couldn’t confirm the authenticity of the documents, and suggested that the photos, which showed macaques with ripped-off skin and fractured tails, could have been taken at another facility or “simply faked.”
Privately, his lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to a former employee named Kathy Strickland.
Strickland often joked that she didn’t have hobbies: she had a veterinary practice. But in 2020, at the start of the pandemic, she’d been forced to close her small-animal emergency clinic in Brunswick, Georgia, because staff members were getting sick. She picked up shifts at other clinics until the fall, when she saw an online ad for a job at Alpha Genesis. It promised a competitive salary, plus benefits, for a forty-hour week. She didn’t know anyone who’d worked with research animals, but she remembered how fondly they were talked about in veterinary school. “We were told about the sacrifice the animals were making for humankind and how, because of that, the treatment of them was better,” she said. She was working non-stop, nearing fifty, and ready for a change.
After joining Alpha Genesis that December, Strickland needed a few days to adjust to the acrid smell of the grounds—feces shot through with ammonia—and to the codes of behavior governing human-macaque interactions. Although her new patients had mostly been born in captivity, they remained undomesticated, with daggerlike teeth. It was best to avoid sustained eye contact, which could be taken as an act of aggression; when the monkeys smacked their lips, it was considered friendly and submissive to lip-smack in return. Nicknames were discouraged but inevitable. The staff joked that Big Papi, a prolific breeder, was Strickland’s boyfriend. She liked to bring him treats: a banana in the morning, Nilla Wafers in the afternoon. Big Papi was courteous and gentlemanly, unlike Grabby, who snatched at pens, glasses, hair—whatever was in sight.
The clinic was dirtier than any of the animal hospitals that Strickland had worked in, with swarms of cockroaches hiding between the metal cages. It was also more dangerous. Many lab monkeys carry an illness called B virus, which rarely harms them but has killed nearly half the people it has infected. Because it can be transmitted through scratches, bites, and saliva, Strickland was required to wear long sleeves, a head covering, a surgical mask, a face shield, steel-toed boots, and two pairs of gloves—and to sedate her charges for even the most straightforward procedures.
She was surprised by how many of the problems she was treating were caused by staff negligence. When the maintenance team forgot to fix a heater, she would end up needing to amputate frostbitten fingers and tails. Or a water line would break, and no one would notice for hours, at which point monkeys would come to her dehydrated, with pinched skin and sunken eyes. Cages were old, and repairs often makeshift, so animals were always escaping—or injuring themselves trying to. In e-mails from July, 2022, one veterinarian identified fifteen recent escapes, adding that a deeper search of records would likely yield more.
The processing team, responsible for trapping and transporting monkeys, was known for causing some of the worst injuries. They frequently returned macaques to the wrong group enclosures, where the animals would proceed to beat one another senseless. The workers themselves could also be rough, using metal nets to slam macaques on the ground. “It was a macho contest, where they didn’t want to let the monkeys get the best of them,” Strickland said. “They would go out there like a bunch of cowboys and grab them by the tails. You’re never supposed to do that, since you can fracture a tail pretty easily.” Often, when the monkeys saw the processing team’s van pull up, they screamed and got the runs—both a defense mechanism and a stress response. The chronic diarrhea could cause part of their intestines to fall out. In severe cases, as long as the tissue wasn’t infected or necrotic, Strickland would gently place it back inside with purse-string stitches.
“People aren’t doing their jobs,” one of her veterinary colleagues wrote to supervisors in the summer of 2022, after entering a building in which the “vast majority of cages had minimal or no food whatsoever.” He listed four monkeys who had lost about a fifth of their body weight and described food covered in mold. “A large amount of us feel like we’re drowning,” he stated in another e-mail. “These woes all go back to the common theme of insufficient training,” he concluded, and quit not long after that. When Strickland sounded this theme to a veterinarian hired by the company to consult on animal welfare, the vet advised her to lower her expectations: “Going into these situations knowing the techs aren’t trained and won’t be able to provide the support you’d like may help you be less frustrated.”
Strickland felt more hopeful when she was able to suggest improvements. St. Ann, who worked with Strickland in the clinic, said that “Dr. Kathy,” as she was called, tried to provide training. Strickland taught her techs how to read syringes, how to take an animal’s temperature and pulse. After she ordered parasite treatments, the infant death rate seemed to drop. But she came to feel that, no matter how many changes she made, she was working within a “culture of disregard.”
Employees at the facility stole pressure washers, respirators, ketamine, and at least one baby macaque, who was rumored to have been traded for a dog and an A.T.V. In the afternoons, some of the areas behind the enclosures took on the atmosphere of a night club. People drank, smoked weed, played dice. “It could get sexual out there,” a longtime supervisor told me. “It wasn’t just the monkeys breeding.”
Strickland glimpsed Westergaard only when he would pop out of his office to pay his respects to the capuchins. Although he drove flashy sports cars, he dressed casually: shorts, T-shirts, a Led Zeppelin hoodie. “We were warned never to speak with him,” Strickland said. “Doctors ended up in screaming matches when they went to him with concerns.”
Veterinarians occupy a conflicted role in laboratories. Their job is to advocate for an animal’s well-being, but when their recommendations complicate or raise the cost of an experiment they might be ignored. Pete Otovic, a veterinarian who has worked at eight primate-research centers, told me he’d come to see his unhappy position as akin to that of an Olympic doctor, whose “goal is to keep someone working rather than to take them out of the game.”
Like several of her colleagues, Strickland submitted anonymous complaints to the Department of Agriculture, which regulates facilities and labs under the Animal Welfare Act. The act almost entirely excludes rats and mice, the most common research animals. It outlines minimal standards for housing, food, and pain management—and is minimally enforced. “Facilities can get consistent warnings and violations, but it’s almost never followed up with any sort of action,” Mary Hollingsworth, a former senior trial attorney at the Department of Justice who now leads Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic, said. Between 2020 and 2025, the more than seventeen thousand zoos, labs, breeders, and classrooms currently covered by the Animal Welfare Act were fined just a hundred and twenty times, according to an analysis by the Animal Welfare Institute. Even when entities are penalized, the U.S.D.A.’s Office of Inspector General says, the fines are so low that violators view them as “a cost of doing business.”
“You can see this pattern play out at Alpha Genesis,” Hollingsworth told me. Over the last eleven years for which records are available, the company has been repeatedly cited by U.S.D.A. inspectors for escapes, insufficient food and water, processing injuries, and preventable deaths, but fined only once: a twelve-thousand-six-hundred-dollar penalty in 2017. (In an e-mail, the U.S.D.A. emphasized that citations were generally enough to insure compliance.) Deaths that drew no fine included an infant strangling itself with gauze, two animals whose fingers were stuck in the wiring of their enclosure, and a female with her head trapped in a chain-link fence and her body soaking wet, raising the possibility that someone had washed the cage without noticing she was dangling from it.
Regulators largely rely on research facilities to self-report animal-welfare violations like these, but Strickland and St. Ann were among several employees who told me that they had been encouraged to avoid mentioning particularly ghastly fatalities. Strickland collected multiple necropsy reports in which signs of trauma or references to hypothermia had been removed between her initial draft and the company’s final submission. “I started documenting little things,” she told me, “to verify as much as I could.” In her journal, Strickland wrote about how, on one of her weekend calls, she planned to euthanize a monkey who was gasping in respiratory distress, but was asked to wait for several hours, because it was enrolled in a valuable study.
There are virtually no limits on what scientists can do to animals once they enter experiments. Although the U.S.D.A. inspects facilities, it delegates oversight of the science to Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, whose members, appointed by a facility’s or university’s leadership, might profit from the research they approve. The committees evaluate whether scientists are considering “the three ‘R’s”: deploying alternatives to animal use (replacement), using as few animals as possible (reduction), and minimizing suffering (refinement). These considerations can meaningfully alter the course of experiments, but the committees are frequently criticized for acting as a rubber stamp, not least because they’ve been shown to sign off on as many as ninety-eight per cent of proposals up for review.
The most notorious procedures at the Yemassee facility were conducted by George Ward, a veterinarian who’d helped LABS of Virginia import macaques from Indonesia in the nineties. Now in his eighties, Ward rented out small buildings on the campus, where he worked with his energetic daughter, Charlene, and a clique of obese monkeys, whose blood he sent to researchers for use in their experiments. Medical guidelines advise against drawing more than ten per cent of an animal’s blood volume, but, according to five former employees who assisted the Wards, at Alpha Genesis and elsewhere, George and Charlene over-bled their animals and shuffled them across the exam table quickly, as though they were car parts on an assembly line. (The Wards did not respond to requests for comment.) “Even those of us who love what we do are extremely hesitant about Dr. Ward,” a technician told me. “He saw everything as a dollar sign.” Some of the Ward monkeys became unusually lethargic; when they got too sick or too old, he harvested their body parts and sold them off as specimens.
Strickland was so busy in the clinic that at first she didn’t realize that even healthier animals were behaving strangely. In the wild, macaques can traverse miles of novel terrain each week and socialize through grooming, but in many laboratories they are isolated in barren cages no bigger than a washing machine. This practice, an effort to reduce uncontrolled variables, drives many primates insane. The majority develop what are known as “stereotypies”—repetitive coping behaviors, like somersaulting, rocking back and forth, and pacing in circles. At least ten per cent of all isolated monkeys self-mutilate. They pluck out fur, poke at their eyes, slam their heads against their cage, and gnaw at their own flesh. St. Ann recalled animals biting their scrotum or penis. More than one monkey whom Strickland treated had chewed through their thighs until they’d reached the bone.
In an attempt to reduce such anguish, the Animal Welfare Act requires that facilities provide “enrichment” for the “psychological well-being” of captive primates. What that looks like has been left up to the facilities themselves. “Putting a stick in the cage was seen as such a big deal that people wrote entire papers about it,” Conlee, the LABS of Virginia behavioral manager from the nineties, told me. Things have become more sophisticated since then, she added, but not by much. Some researchers provide puzzle toys, grooming sessions, or TV; others might offer a small mirror. Hundreds of monkeys at Alpha Genesis are “singly housed” in small cages, but the majority are held in group enclosures, where they’re supplied with balls, swings, perches to climb on, and—the most popular form of “enrichment”—snacks. “It’s the highlight of their day, and one of the saddest things, how excited they are about a piece of sweet potato or a couple of Froot Loops,” a former vet tech said. Even the smallest diversions seem to make a difference, a testament to the monkeys’ loneliness and privation. Touch is so important to macaques that if they are paired together, or given a small opening through which to stroke each other’s fur, they are less likely to tear themselves apart.
While reasonable people disagree about the ethics of using animals for research, a growing number of scientists have come to believe that we are currently using them poorly. Of the treatments that show promise in animal studies, around ninety per cent go on to fail in human trials. In 2014, an analysis of more than two thousand drugs found that animal tests were “highly inconsistent” at predicting toxic responses in humans and “little better than what would result merely by chance.”
Some of these failures can be chalked up to biology: even the great apes, our closest genetic kin, have proved to be lousy proxies for humans. But others might stem from the conditions in which these experiments take place. Mental health and immune response are affected by how animals are feeling—and, as the rash of stereotypies suggests, captive animals are not feeling well. “In some cases, we’re inducing psychiatric disorders, and then trying to model those disorders, when all of our control groups are nut cases,” Larry Carbone, a prominent lab-animal veterinarian and ethicist, told me. “It’s a bit like saying, ‘I’m only going to study neurotic white men in their early thirties in Cleveland, but then I’m going to try to extrapolate from that to human health globally.’ ” Carbone, who spent years working at some of the nation’s top labs, noticed that the scientists least concerned about animal welfare were often those least involved with their animals’ day-to-day care. Seeking to transform their test subjects into tidy rows of data, they were willing to overlook troubling behaviors.
The psychologist John Gluck was once such a researcher, an experience that he recounts with great candor in a 2016 memoir, “Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey.” Gluck came of age as a scientist in the nineteen-sixties, when the potential gains of primate research were widely viewed as worth any suffering that the animals might endure. As a graduate student, he trained under Harry Harlow, a psychologist who headed the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center. Harlow became famous for his studies of depression and maternal deprivation, some of which involved isolating baby macaques at the bottom of a vertical steel chamber that he’d nicknamed “the pit of despair”—an ordeal from which they never fully recovered. In study after study, Harlow, Gluck, and their colleagues found that their primates were sentient, self-aware, and severely distressed. This, Gluck realized, was the paradox: monkeys were celebrated as test subjects for their similarities to humans, but, when it came to the animals’ suffering, those similarities were “minimized, ignored, or denied.”
Over the decades, Gluck started to question the value of conducting psychological experiments on monkeys. Such studies often seemed to reiterate well-observed phenomena—for example, that prolonged fear and isolation cause long-lasting trauma—and to offer little use to humans. Some Alpha Genesis monkeys have ended up in one of the country’s most controversial psychology labs, run by Elisabeth Murray, a neuroscientist at the N.I.H., in Bethesda. In what PETA calls her “fright experiments,” Murray creates targeted lesions in the brains of macaques by injecting them with neurotoxins or suctioning out parts of the tissue. Then she places them inside darkened cages where a guillotine-style door eventually snaps open, revealing a toy snake or spider that can be made to jump. Sometimes monkeys undergo additional surgeries in which steel posts are implanted into their skulls, preventing their heads from moving during tests. Murray told me by e-mail that her research adheres to “the highest standards for animal husbandry and veterinary care,” that it provides crucial insight into the brain, and that it can help identify treatments for conditions like P.T.S.D. Her critics, Gluck among them, disagree, contending that human trauma is shaped by myriad experiences, which can’t be simulated by exposing a brain-damaged monkey to a fake spider.
When Strickland read about these kinds of experiments, she wondered if, by prolonging the lives of research animals, she was merely prolonging their suffering. She feared that the situation would be even worse for the monkeys if she quit—a sentiment I heard often from workers at Alpha Genesis and at labs across the country. Strickland considered herself a doctor, not an activist, but she constantly argued with her supervisors about how the monkeys were treated. In July, 2023, she sent colleagues an e-mail about switched-off exhaust fans and sweltering temperatures in some of the facility’s buildings, quoting the ventilation requirements in the Animal Welfare Act and calling the situation “ridiculous.” The next day, she was fired.
In the months that followed, she picked up shifts in emergency clinics and tried to get into medical writing, but whenever she read about animal experiments she’d start to cry. She knew about burnout, which she’d experienced while running her own clinic. This felt different. As she saw it, she’d gone from having the laid-back personality of the Dude—the bathrobe-clad character portrayed by Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski,” her favorite movie—to having that of the Dude’s foil, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), an uptight Vietnam veteran with P.T.S.D. She started meeting with a therapist, who’d formerly worked as a vet tech, and they discussed the guilt she felt about leaving the animals behind. For months, she’d been having a recurring dream in which an alpha-male macaque was following her around, hopping up and down on all fours. He bared his teeth, but not in an aggressive manner. He was just trying to get her attention.
After hearing about the heater deaths in November, Strickland sent the material she’d collected to Alka Chandna, a vice-president of laboratory investigations at PETA. “I’ve seen a lot of these problems over the years,” Chandna told me. “What I found shocking in this case was all of the e-mails flowing where they acknowledged the problems but nothing seemed to get better.” Before filing a complaint with the U.S.D.A., Chandna agreed to protect Strickland’s anonymity, though Strickland understood that this might prove impossible. As she texted St. Ann, “Anyone that ever worked with me should be able to figure out the common person in all those documents. 🙄.”
On my first day in Yemassee, just after New Year’s, I was driving down the road where Vance had spotted the monkeys when I saw six men staring up at the pines. A few yards in front of them was a rusted metal cage. One man was flying a remote-controlled drone over the trees.
By the time I arrived, thirty-nine of the forty-three monkeys had been recaptured. A vet tech told me that some had sauntered back into the front end of their enclosure, which was baited with fruit; others had been caught with humane traps manufactured by a company called Havahart. But as temperatures dropped below freezing and the final four runaways remained at large, activists feared that Westergaard might take more extreme measures to reclaim them. On several occasions, he’d floated the possibility of using tranquillizer darts, a technique that can injure monkeys by puncturing internal organs or sending them tumbling out of trees. Perhaps because of the attention generated by the escape, or the fact that the escapees were technically N.I.H. property, he’d so far demurred.
When I parked and introduced myself as a reporter to a man wearing an Alpha Genesis baseball cap, he walked away. The rest of the search party awkwardly stared at the ground and answered my questions in monosyllables, when they answered them at all. The man piloting the drone and a colleague of his, Noel Myers, a U.S.D.A. state director of wildlife services, were visiting Yemassee at the behest of Alpha Genesis. Myers told me that it was his first time tracking down primates, but that all he’d seen so far were birds and deer. I asked the other men how long they’d been looking.
“Too long,” one said.
“Weeks,” said another.
When was the last time they’d seen the monkeys?
“We haven’t.”
People in town were looser with talk. Everyone had a story about a time, growing up, when they’d heard about a monkey crossing the train tracks or rummaging through a neighbor’s trash. “It’s going to keep happening,” Lennie Mathis, a clerk at Moore’s Liquor Sales, said of the serial escapes. Mathis had worked on the animal-care and security teams at Alpha Genesis for twenty-two years, becoming deeply familiar with the ways of macaques. “Whenever you walk in the room, they watch you,” he said. “All they have to do is watch you.” Now seventy, he dressed like a hipster: frayed blue jeans, white Reebok sneakers, and a sweatshirt with a cartoon monkey sticking out its tongue.
During one nighttime shift, Mathis had gone into an enclosure at two in the morning to check on a heater, but before he could turn on the light five monkeys jumped him, having unlocked a gate in apparent need of repair. “Two of them bit me in my ear, and one bit me in my back,” he said. “I was fighting them monkeys off me that night, and I couldn’t find the damn door to get out. Finally, I found the doorknob and I turned it, thank God.” After the lunch rush at the liquor store, during which he sold mini-bottles to some of his former colleagues, Mathis unzipped his hoodie to show me his scars.
The more time I spent in Yemassee, the more I kept hearing that the employee who’d let the monkeys out in November was a recent high-school graduate. “They told us no one knows who she is,” her mother, Shirena Collins, said when I knocked on her door in January. I explained that, given the circuitous route by which I’d found her—a conversation at the mini-mart led me to a cashier at a Dollar General, who pointed me to an outlet store in the city of Beaufort, after which I located Collins’s mobile home—that was probably still the case. Collins said that her daughter, Kaira Garvin, had just moved out, but she invited me in anyway. “This has been going on for a long time,” she sighed, settling into a leather couch. Collins had been raised in the housing project down the road from the Monkey Farm; whenever the animals made a run for it, her family would keep her inside.
Collins called her daughter on FaceTime. “There’s someone here who wants to talk to you,” she said. Garvin was sitting on a bed in her dorm after her first day of classes at Benedict College, in Columbia, South Carolina. She had worked at Alpha Genesis for only three weeks, she said. It was her first real job, after a stint at McDonald’s, and she’d loved it. As an animal-care technician, she was responsible for feeding the monkeys and cleaning their cages. She was doing so well that her supervisor had already allowed her to handle some of the enclosures on her own.
One of those enclosures belonged to the new troop from Morgan Island. They seemed terrified of people, Kaira said; whenever she entered their area, they’d run to the opposite side and hug one another. On the day of the escape, she recalled, she’d gone to grab a pressure hose to wash down their enclosure, leaving only one of its three gates open. She hadn’t yet learned that the monkeys would be watching her every move. It wasn’t until a few minutes later, when her supervisor alerted her on a walkie-talkie, that she realized the monkeys were gone.
“They fired me,” she said. “But then they said I walked off the job.” Garvin’s family had to drive past Alpha Genesis to go to church, and when Garvin saw the scrum of reporters and cop cars outside she panicked. After that, she entered a deep depression and stopped leaving her room. Collins regularly checked on her to make sure that she hadn’t killed herself. “When my baby hurts, she hurts,” she said. Garvin was offended that the company said she’d fled the scene, which made her seem like a malicious employee rather than what she was: an undertrained and overwhelmed teen-ager.
In a letter to the N.I.H., Alpha Genesis later wrote that it had “terminated” the technician responsible, confirming, despite its own public statements, that Garvin hadn’t quit on the job. But perhaps Westergaard’s insinuation that Alpha Genesis was under siege from animal-liberation “extremists” was the cannier P.R. move. After all, though many Americans harbor an instinctive aversion to animal testing, they also dislike the idea of crunchy do-gooders meddling with private property. By hinting that his business was the victim of shape-shifting saboteurs, Westergaard distracted from the more prosaic story about the carelessness of his staff.
Yet it occurred to me that both narratives—the one about activists and the one about accidents—obscured the role played by the monkeys themselves, who seemed to be very much trying to leave. In “Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance” (2011), the writer Jason Hribal argues that confined animals are praised as intelligent beings until they escape, at which point their actions are attributed to brute instinct, or human error. But for monkeys in captivity, Hribal observes, freedom becomes an abiding preoccupation. He recounts a story about three Japanese macaques at the Pittsburgh Zoo who fashioned a bridge from a fallen tree branch to sneak out of their exhibit. Apes are even more methodical. Orangutans sometimes spend weeks finding the necessary materials (wires, bolts, screws), hiding their elaborate preparations from their keepers, and awaiting the perfect moment to execute their plans.
In January, a few days before Donald Trump’s Inauguration, I met the man who had done more than anyone to turn the Yemassee fugitives into a cause célèbre on Capitol Hill. “Right now is a golden age for anti-vivisection,” Justin Goodman, the policy director of White Coat Waste, said. He sat in his living room, near Annapolis, Maryland, snacking on vegan mezze in his slippers and cuddling with his wife, Stacy Lopresti-Goodman. As students at the University of Connecticut, the two had worked together to close the campus’s only primate lab. Lopresti-Goodman went on to become a psychology professor at Marymount University, where she has studied the trauma of captive primates, while Goodman realized that shutting down labs was his vocation. The week before my visit, he’d been talking with the conservative activist Roger Stone, staffers from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and Nancy Mace, whose 2021 press conference off the shore of Morgan Island he’d helped coördinate. For years, he’d demanded that the government stop financing “monkey prisons” like Alpha Genesis, and now he spoke with the zealous energy of anticipation. “We are bullish on the incoming Administration’s ability to stop animal testing,” he told me. “It’s the perfect storm of conditions.”
White Coat Waste was founded in 2011 by Anthony Bellotti, a Republican consultant who, while campaigning to defund the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood, discovered that he could reframe the issue of animal experimentation as yet another example of federal misspending. His group eschews associations with “animal rights,” describing itself instead as a government-watchdog organization “uniting liberty-lovers and animal-lovers.” When the pandemic arrived, Bellotti and Goodman recognized that the growing constituency of people who’d come to hate scientists could also, with the right messaging, be made to hate the fact that scientists experimented on animals. Unlike other groups that oppose animal research, White Coat Waste does not concern itself with what people eat, wear, or hunt. “We’re a fanatically single-issue coalition,” Goodman said, “and that’s how we’ve been able to broaden the tent.”
Before joining White Coat Waste, in 2016, Goodman worked for nearly a decade at PETA, where he gradually came to feel that its “establishment approach”— a phrase that might raise eyebrows, given that the group is best known for its anti-fur advertisements featuring nude celebrities—was futile. “We would claim victory when one lab finally got shut down, but another five would just pop up in its place, because the money was still available,” Goodman told me. “That’s why wiping out taxpayer funding for animal testing is the most efficient way to save the most animals.” (When I asked Chandna, from PETA, about these remarks, she said, “We’ve pointed out the federal boondoggle from the start. White Coat Waste has young-male-testosterone energy, and it seems like they attack all the other groups for fund-raising purposes.”)
From Goodman’s perspective, Trump’s second term has been a roaring success. Along with ending grants for thousands of N.I.H.-funded studies on topics that the Administration has deemed unworthy—H.I.V. prevention, maternal-health disparities, vaccine hesitancy—DOGE terminated millions of dollars in grants for animal experiments, including specific line items that White Coat Waste said it had flagged: a $299,240 grant to create “transgender mice,” $1.1 million to use rats to study the party drug GHB. This spring, the N.I.H., the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration each announced significant plans to deprioritize the use of lab animals. The N.I.H. will require grant-review staff to undergo training to address “possible bias towards animal studies”; the E.P.A. has urged employees to adopt zebra fish and rats that it is retiring from research; and the F.D.A., in a bid to lower drug pricing, intends for testing on animals to be the exception rather than the norm within five years. “God did not make animals on planet Earth for us to abuse and torture,” Marty Makary, the commissioner of the F.D.A., told regulators and scientists in July.
That month, Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and preternaturally gifted Trump whisperer with no official role in the Administration, posted on X that the Department of Defense “just exclusively told me this morning that they have made the decision to end all of the cruel dog and cat testing contracts exposed by White Coat Waste.” Goodman had brought these contracts, worth fifty-seven million dollars, to Loomer’s attention, after he appeared on her show in April. The two have been working together ever since, Loomer told me. “We’re the party who is actually cracking down on animal abusers,” she said. “We’re the party that stood up for the dogs and cats of Ohio that were being eaten by Haitian illegals.”
Whenever I asked Goodman if he worried that his cause was being used as a fig leaf for the Trump Administration’s campaign against science and academic research more broadly, he shrugged off the question. “I will work with anyone who has the power or political will to get animals out of labs,” he said. Recently, I brought up an executive order that Trump issued in May which grants political appointees the power to “correct scientific information,” control the way it is communicated to the public, and initiate “discipline” against anyone who fails to parrot the MAHA line—a move that may effectively end scientific independence. “My goal is to save animals, not science,” Goodman replied. “I could care less about scientific institutions and whether they burn.”
The collaboration between certain MAGA influencers and animal-rights activists has drawn out the most confrontational tendencies within each camp. This summer, Loomer and White Coat Waste took aim at an unusual target: Nicole Kleinstreuer, a toxicologist who is spearheading the N.I.H.’s effort to expedite, of all things, the replacement of animals in regulatory testing and research. Under Kleinstreuer’s leadership, the agency has launched a new office to develop and validate alternatives to animal studies, such as computer simulations and “organ on a chip” technologies. Kleinstreuer has said that she wants to “create lasting change for animal-free science.” But because she has echoed the scientific consensus—namely that, in the meantime, some animals remain necessary—White Coat Waste has branded her an enemy of progress and a “Fauci-loving ‘animal testing czar.’ ” Kleinstreuer, who subsequently received harassing messages and death threats online, has required security protection.
White Coat Waste’s criticism of Kleinstreuer has set it apart from the broader animal-rights movement. (“Have they lost their fucking minds?” Lisa Jones-Engel, the PETA scientist, said.) It is far from the only group, however, peddling the claim that an immediate end to animal research would be not only ethically justified but scientifically sound. This absolutist framing elides the fact that, though non-animal methods are highly effective in certain areas—such as skin sensitivity and eye irritation—they cannot replicate the complexity of living, functioning organisms, especially in efforts to understand whole-body reactions, neurochemistry, and progressive disease. Monkeys remain critical, not least for vaccine development and studying reproductive health. As an N.I.H. official wrote in a letter to members of White Coat Waste’s board, “True progress in this area cannot occur overnight—it takes time, and pretending otherwise is misleading, counterproductive, and dangerous.”
Pretending otherwise, though, holds greater emotional appeal. “People want the idea that we don’t need animals anymore to be true because they love animals,” Heather Sidener, a former head of clinical medicine at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, said. “They haven’t really had the hard conversation with themselves about, What if it was my husband? What if it was my child? Would I really say to them, ‘I think you should die because I don’t think we should use animals to see if this new medicine is safe’?” Cindy Buckmaster, a scientist and a former chair of Americans for Medical Progress, an advocacy group for animal research, told me that when we no longer need lab animals it will be the “happiest day of my life”—but that, until then, researchers should insure that each animal they do use is made to count. “The way we view animals has changed a lot in the past twenty years,” she said, “and we need to own up to our shortcomings.”
After his disillusionment, Gluck, the primate researcher, retrained as an ethicist. In this role, he often finds himself giving lectures on the moral quandaries posed by his past career. Though his audience sometimes looks to him for prescriptions, he tends to avoid TED-talk bromides and ten-point plans, emphasizing, instead, his epistemic humility. There is still so much we don’t know about monkeys—but what we do know, he contends, should make scientists worry that the conditions of captivity are damaging their research. “The primary question we have to be concerned with is: how do we do this differently?” he told me recently. “Who are these animals? What is their life like? How can you create an environment that is least abusive?” Recognizing that animals are complex beings, with complex needs, may not only reduce their suffering but also yield better science.
A few weeks after my trip to Yemassee, the remaining macaques were apprehended after trappers noticed their footprints in some freshly fallen snow. Westergaard announced that the monkeys were healthy, safe, and celebrating their reunion. PETA had its doubts. Someone in town had told the activists that a monkey had been hit by a car, and the group was now demanding that Alpha Genesis provide “proof of life.” On Facebook, Westergaard thanked the people of Yemassee for their support during the recapture mission. “As for PETA,” he added, “they can go f*** themselves.”
Throughout the year, Westergaard did not respond to my texts, calls, voice mails, or e-mails; when I visited his office to request an interview, security escorted me off the premises. Neither he nor his company responded to questions about animal-welfare violations and allegations of negligence. Meanwhile, he continued to spar with PETA online. At one point, he denounced the documents that it had released from Strickland as part of a “misinformation campaign” that sought “to erode public trust in critical research institutions.” This seemed curious, since Westergaard had spent much of the spring and summer cozying up to an Administration that routinely attacked such institutions. In May, after Alpha Genesis passed its most recent U.S.D.A. inspections without any citations, Westergaard announced his company’s unwavering support for Trump’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. “We believe that cutting-edge science and compassionate care go hand-in-hand,” he said, adding that the recent inspection results reflected “the organization’s proactive, professional approach to research and animal husbandry.” One of his press releases featured an A.I.-generated illustration of three grinning macaques in MAHA baseball caps. Another euphemistically described the axe that the Administration has taken to the scientific enterprise as “programmatic changes in research priorities.” That these “programmatic changes” threaten to demolish not just animal research but one of its crowning achievements—the reduction of childhood illness and death through vaccination—went unmentioned.
Alpha Genesis’s red-meat pivot is emblematic of the desperate position in which the primate-breeding industry now finds itself. “Greg Westergaard is trying to make the best of an increasingly bad situation,” Goodman, of White Coat Waste, told me this summer. “It will be worse for him sooner rather than later, if I have anything to do with it.” In June, Goodman brokered a get-together with Loomer and Mace, who is now running for governor of South Carolina. They posed for photos with a beagle rescued from a laboratory breeding facility and discussed turning Morgan Island into a sanctuary. Not long after, Mace told the Post and Courier that Westergaard had sent a member of his family to “spy” on her at a town-hall meeting in Yemassee. The congresswoman has joined White Coat Waste, PETA, and a group called Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! to demand that the government end Alpha Genesis’s federal contracts, several of which were awarded this year. (The N.I.H. declined to comment, citing “the Democrat-led shutdown.”)
Strickland told me that she supports the efforts to close Alpha Genesis and reduce animal testing, but she fears that the White House’s reckless approach could undermine progress toward new cures. She has diabetes, and last November her husband learned that he had metastatic colon cancer. When we met, earlier this year, she showed me a tattoo on her forearm. “Insulin Addict,” it read. I asked about her bicep, where several lovingly rendered long-tailed macaques were peeking out beneath her T-shirt. “There’s a juvie, an older guy who’s a little shy, an older mom, and an alpha male showing his teeth,” she explained, lifting her sleeve. They were pictured in the wild, surrounded by fronds and trees.
The Trump Administration’s attempt to defund scientific research has been accompanied by a bout of animal-related deregulation. In the week after his Inauguration, Trump fired the U.S.D.A.’s inspector general, whose office had been investigating Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer-interface company, in the wake of reporting on the grisly deaths of some of its rhesus macaques. (Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment.) The U.S.D.A.’s over-all workforce has since shrunk by roughly fifteen per cent. In July, the agency gave Alpha Genesis an “official warning,” without a fine, for the twenty-two heater-related deaths last November. Strickland wondered whether, as fewer experiments are conducted in federally funded laboratories, research would increase at privately owned facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and biotech firms subject to less oversight. “Westergaard might end up positioning himself into being even more of a monopoly,” she told me. “It’s been a very double-edged sword.”
One sunny afternoon in South Carolina, I took a boat to Morgan Island. My captain, Scott Gordon, was a high-school visual-arts teacher who offered tours along the coast as a side hustle. He had long, shaggy hair and a pronounced surfer’s drawl. A squall had just blown through the bay, and the water seemed almost still, its surface reflecting egrets, herons, and little wisps of cloud in the sky. Gordon warned me that this was deceiving. “It’s still going to be pretty fucking cold,” he said. He wore a red felt beret, a snowboarding jacket over a sweatshirt, and orange wind-breaking pants on top of long johns and jeans. He loaned me a second pair of gloves and a neon balaclava. We looked like we were heading to a Nordic rave.
Out on the sound, we sped past grassy islets and an upturned shrimp boat. Gordon gestured north. If we turned left and followed the Combahee River, he said, we’d reach the ferry landing where Harriet Tubman had launched a Union raid that destroyed several plantations and freed more than seven hundred enslaved people.
Gordon slowed the boat as Morgan Island appeared, along with warning signs explaining that we were under video surveillance and should not disturb the animals, emit wastewater, or trespass. The island was forested with palmettos and live oaks, but there was no sign of primate life. “Usually, they’re all up around this area,” Gordon said apologetically. He cut the engine, wondering if it had spooked the animals. We could hear an Alpha Genesis employee puttering around on the dock.
An hour passed. The tide rose. I borrowed Gordon’s binoculars to look for monkeys, unsuccessfully, while he took a leak in the water. Just as we were about to give up, the Alpha Genesis employee rode off in a powerboat. After she disappeared around the bend, two rhesus macaques sprinted down the sloping branch of a tree. They were juveniles, tiny and curious. “I think they’re fucking scouts,” Gordon whispered. “They can tell who’s who.”
Slowly, cautiously, a few more appeared, their chests tattooed with black numbers and letters. We heard screeching, hooting, barking. Soon they were everywhere, clambering down trees, jumping onto the roof of a shed, and dangling from branches. A big one, the size of a terrier, strutted along the sand. He was followed by an interested female, her behind swollen red. “The struggle for dominance, the things about being human on an elementary level, you can see it all play out here,” Gordon said. A mother groomed an infant with exacting devotion. Two playmates took a running leap at each other, falling backward to the ground. Occasionally, a monkey glanced at our boat, but most were turned away from the shore. Against experience, they’d decided that we could be trusted, and paid us no mind. ♦
