Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

monkeywire - Zoe the Gibbon Adopted by Ape-Loving Car Dealer

monkeywire AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>
  • To: monkeywire AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Zoe the Gibbon Adopted by Ape-Loving Car Dealer
  • Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 18:54:15 -0500


AP - July 3, 2001

The latest addition to car dealers menagerie is a star attraction

By SANDY WELLS, The Charleston Gazette

SPRING HILL, W.Va. - Like any proud new father, about all he can talk about is the baby. Her name is Zoe. She's 5 months old, and she's the apple of her daddy's eye.

"She has a great personality," he says, cuddling her to his chest. "And she's very affectionate. She knows who her daddy is. If I walk in the room, she jumps up and hollers for her daddy to come get her."

While Daddy works, she naps or plays contentedly in the playpen beside his desk. She hugs her stuffed animals while she sucks her thumb, swats at the colorful toys dangling around her, crawls on the miniature jungle gym or up the sides of the playpen.

To hear him talk, she's the perfect baby. "Right off the bat, she slept through the night. I keep her playpen beside my bed. She goes to bed at 9:30 and gets up a 8."

She wears preemie-size disposable diapers. "She goes through five a day," he says. "I'd never diapered a baby in my life. Now I can put one on in four or five-seconds."

It's a good thing. "You can never potty-train a primate," he says.

A primate?

Baby Zoe is a very rare white-faced gibbon. She's the size of a monkey, a Curious George type, but she belongs to the ape family because she has no tail. No matter. Most people call her a monkey anyway.

She hangs out with her daddy, Lester Raines, at his car dealership in Spring Hill. He brings her to work every day, the newest addition to an office menagerie that includes two small fennec foxes and a dozen talking, squawking, chirping exotic birds. But Zoe steals the show. Customers and employees constantly stop by the office to visit her and watch her perform. "Everybody wants to know where they can get one," Raines said. "They can't."

Raines waited 10 years. Because gibbons are an endangered species, they can't be bought and sold like cats and dogs, or even chimpanzees, he explains. "You can buy chimps for upwards of $50,000, but nobody can buy a gibbon. She's on breeder loan to me."

When she matures, he will give her up long enough for her to mate. In fact, he's already picked her suitors. "I've got her marriage all arranged. A friend in Natural Bridge, Va., has a zoo and he has three boy gibbons. When she's old enough, I'm going to breed her with one of his boys."

The baby will belong to the government, part of a USDA program to increase the gibbon population.

"Chimpanzees are always everybody's first choice," he says. "But when they get to be 6 or 7, they get very strong and can be very mean and dangerous. People end up having to take them to a zoo, and that's hard. You can keep these monkeys for a lifetime."

Of all the primates, gibbons rank just behind chimps in intelligence, he says. "She's learned a lot from me in the past few weeks. I want to train her to do different things. I've got her a basketball and a little rim and she's already dropping the ball through the net. They can jump 6 or 7 feet when they get older. If she could take a basketball and jump like that, wouldn't that be something?"

A gibbon can jump 30 feet from tree to tree, he says. "They're very acrobatic. But I don't want her to be wild and crazy. I went to see her parents, and they're very well-mannered. So I've been working with her. They're just like kids. They can be mean or good."

He fell in love with the little apes the first time he saw them and asked a breeder friend in Florida if he could get one someday. "Ten years later, she called and said she had a female ready to have a baby. I told her I hoped it was a girl. I wanted a little girl. I went to Florida and picked her up. You can imagine how excited I was.

"They don't give them to just anybody," he says. "You have to have experience with animals."

Raines certainly qualifies in that category. For years, he welcomed visitors to his Poca River farm to see the unusual animals he'd collected - zebras, kangaroos, flamingos, bears, camels, a leopard, turtles, Clydesdales, African antelopes, ostriches and miniature horses, among other creatures.
The zoo started with the miniature horses, he says. "I was down in Florida on a greyhound trip, and I saw a farm with a bunch of little horses running around. I went to the barn and asked what they were. They said they were miniatures horses. Before I left, I owned four."

Zoe's doting dad takes her everywhere he goes, even to the beach. "She couldn't build a sand castle," he says, "but she sure knew how to knock one down."

She travels in a cat carrier, or around his neck in a papoose carrier.

At home, she plays with his two golden retrievers. "She'll be on the floor and punch one of them in the nose, but they won't hurt her. They know she's something special."




  • Zoe the Gibbon Adopted by Ape-Loving Car Dealer, Carrie McLaren, 07/05/2001

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page