The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

[Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>]

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."