Jez Hermer was on morning patrol in a village near Daru, a rebel-surrounded
enclave in Sierra Leone, when he heard a distressed, high-pitched squealing that
reminded him of something he had heard as a boy.
It was like the screaming of a chimpanzee he remembered from watching Tarzan
on television in the 1970s. As he rounded the corner, he found a group of young
children taunting a chimpanzee that was tied round the neck with a piece of
string. The creature was being thrown around like a ball.
A chimpanzee at the Monkey World sanctuary, which provides shelter for more
than 150 rescued primates
It was August 2000. To this day, Major Hermer, ex-Royal Marines, does not
know what compelled him to investigate the minor ruckus. He was a military
observer for the United Nations, liaising between two warring factions: the
Sierra Leone Army and the Revolutionary United Front.
He and his men were
living in mud huts in Daru, in an area protected by the 5/8 Gurkha Rifles, an
Indian battalion, but they were vulnerable and under regular attack. The
conflict had reached a tense stage. Hermer, in charge of operations, had plenty
to do. 'Something really forced me to go out,' he says. 'I was intrigued. I am
not a particularly spiritual person and I don't believe in fate but, for the
first time in my life, I heard a voice in my head and it said, "Go and check
that out. It will change your life."?'
At the sight of him, the chimpanzee held out its arms as if begging to be
picked up. 'He latched on to my leg. He stank. He was covered in festering
sores. He was really just a bag of bones. It didn't take an expert to see he was
in a very bad condition and didn't have long to live. But I knew so little about
these things I thought a couple of bananas would fix the problem.'
The hunter who owned the baby chimp had probably shot and eaten the mother
and her troop as part of the bushmeat trade, leaving the orphaned baby as a
plaything. Hermer
named him Harry. Though about 14 months old, the chimpanzee should still
have been inseparable from its mother, riding everywhere on her back.
Hermer felt he had no choice but to take it back to base that evening. 'In my
career in war zones, I have seen the suffering of both humans and animals, and
you get pretty hardened to harsh conditions and desperate sights. But there is
something about a primate that means you have more of a connection. He was a
sorry sight, frightened and sick. I had to do something.'
Like so many small impulses and actions, Hermer's moment of compassion had
far-reaching consequences. 'I have always been an animal lover, but with Harry I
didn't have a clue what I was getting into,' he says. The decision not only
thrust him into a bruising encounter with wildlife conservation politics, but it
also changed the course of his life.
Seven years on, Hermer, 38, has left the Marines with 15 years of his
commission still to run and is helping to run the world's largest ape-rescue
centre, Monkey World, a 65-acre sanctuary in Dorset. It is the place he had
phoned for help, back in 2000, when he was at his wits' end to know how to look
after Harry.
Monkey World is a few miles from where Hermer and his wife, Jenny, lived in
Poole. Jim
Cronin, the centre's charismatic late owner and his wife, Alison, were well
known through their ITV television series, Monkey Business, a sort of primates'
soap opera.
Hermer, marooned in the jungle, asked Jenny to ring the sanctuary for advice.
'I was able to get fluids into Harry, as well as bananas. I dressed his wounds,
using my Army medical pack. But Harry was riddled with worms and other ailments.
I needed professional advice.'
Hermer was working up to 20 hours a day and had to admit that a dependent,
disease-ridden chimpanzee was not the ideal messmate. Certain colleagues agreed.
Their initial reactions had ranged from 'Let's eat him' to 'Let's fix him up.'
Hermer considered giving Harry to Tacugama, a chimpanzee rehabilitation centre
in Freetown.
'I had an evening of deep contemplation,' Hermer says. 'I wasn't prepared to
euthanise him and I wasn't keen to hand him over to an organisation I knew was
strapped for cash. My superiors regarded Harry as an unnecessary distraction and
I could see their point of view. I was supposed to be in command. Even when I'd
weaned him off my leg and on to my shoulder, he still needed attention 24 hours
a day.'
The chimpanzee was grudgingly allowed to stay and slowly began to gain
weight, thanks to medication and a regime of baby milk formula (helicoptered in
from Freetown), recommended by Cronin. Hermer started to teach him to climb
trees. But Harry's growing independence was a problem; he was strong,
bad-tempered and had begun to terrorise the camp. 'Instead of being clingy, he
started acting like an out-of-control toddler,' Hermer says. 'He was as strong
as me, and it took all my strength to wrest something from him.'
But Hermer fell out with nearly everyone else. Knowing that a baby chimp
could be sold for $50 to UN soldiers - a king's ransom in that part of Africa -
he agreed to pay compensation to the owner. He made one condition: if the hunter
or his friends were seen with any more chimps, they would be arrested for
trapping an endangered species and possessing an illegal weapon. Their weapons
would be confiscated. 'I don't think they understood about the endangered
species,' Hermer says, 'but they got the bit about illegal weapons.
'It was a controversial thing to do. Eyebrows were raised. I was sympathetic
to the hunters' plight - many are on the brink of starvation. It is easy to
stand there in your blue beret and fatigues, dispensing justice, but the issues
are never black and white. I think the whole bushmeat trade is appalling but I
don't sit in judgment on the impoverished people caught up in it. I had to
continue to work in the area and I needed their co-operation.'
Next, Hermer ran into trouble with the supporters of Tacugama, who accused
him of being involved in removing Harry from his peer group and habitat.'They
accused me of being a chimp smuggler and a lot of character-blackening went on.
At that stage, I would have been very happy to get rid of him. He was
destructive, unhygienic and boisterous. He was taking over my life.'
An anti-Hermer website sprang up. Hermer had his first taste of international
primate politics - and Harry of the downside of celebrity. Meanwhile, the
Cronins' efforts to get Harry to Monkey World were floundering. Cites (the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora)
backed their proposal to have him and the Ministry of Defence mooted flying him
to England. But the Sierra Leone government was stalling. The debate had become
embarrassingly noisy and Hermer was hauled before the British High Commissioner.
Within 24 hours, he was ordered to surrender Harry to Tacugama.
'They assured me he would be looked after well and I left them with a hefty
donation. All I had ever wanted was the best for Harry, but he had become an
example of a much wider conservation problem - the internecine rivalry between
government departments and animal welfare organisations. It is a big ego trip
for some people. I am pretty cynical about it.'
Hermer, who had joined the Army in 1985 and transferred to the Marines in
1990, once brought three feral dogs home from Borneo, where he was an instructor
at a jungle warfare school for three years, but he is no sentimentalist. It is
more a matter, he says, of not being able to walk by if he sees neglect and
suffering.
A few weeks after he had ended his tour of duty in Sierra Leone, in early
2001, he was told Harry had died of shingella, a bacterial gut infection. But
the conspiracy theories go on and there have been many alleged sightings of the
chimpanzee.
Hermer kept in touch with the Cronins. Over a meal in a fish restaurant in
Poole, Jim, Alison, Jez and Jenny (a partner in a Bournemouth law firm) became
good friends, picking over the Harry controversy, discussing the principles and
ethics of primate rescue. 'We hit it off immediately. We shared the same values.
Jim and Alison educated me in the political rivalries of the conservation
world.'
He heard how Cronin, an American, had always been fascinated by primates. As
a young boy in Yonkers, New York, he would wait every day for the local organ
grinder and his capuchin monkey. He became a keeper at Bronx Zoo, then moved to
John Aspinall's animal park at Howletts in Kent where he set up a primate
breeding programme. There, he discovered that on beaches in southern Spain
chimpanzees were being drugged, beaten and used as photographers' props. Cronin
left his job at Howletts to do something about it.
Promising a home for every victim of the Spanish beach photography trade, he
leased a former pig farm near Wareham in Dorset. The Spanish authorities were
delighted to be offered a solution and couldn't confiscate chimpanzees fast
enough. Monkey World opened in 1987 with nine chimps, not as a tourist
attraction but as a place where abused primates could enjoy a happy retirement.
Cronin was joined in his enterprise by Jeremy Keeling, a former Howletts keeper.
The place evolved slowly, every new addition to the park exposing a different
form of abuse. Cronin was not an expansionist or a publicity seeker, but he knew
how to tap into public support for his rescues. He would build monkey enclosures
only when he needed them.
If an animal was sick and should not be on display, he would close that
section of the park, even on a Bank Holiday. By the time he died earlier this
year, there were more than 160 monkeys at the self-supporting sanctuary, visited
by half a million visitors a year. He knew every one by name and habit. Last
year, he and Alison received MBEs for their work; he was given his posthumously,
at his memorial service in June.
Jim and Alison, a fellow American and primate specialist, met in 1993. She
had studied biological anthropology at Cambridge and turned up at Monkey World
to discuss fencing techniques. They fell in love immediately. Their emotional
and professional compatibility, so evident in the television series that
highlights their rescue missions, increased Monkey World's fame.
Monkey World, a Jurassic Park for primates, is home to rehabilitated
chimpanzees, marmosets, orang-utans, capuchins, woolly monkeys and five species
of gibbon - including the critically endangered yellow-cheeked gibbon. Baby
primates are a cash crop.
The Cronins worked to kill the trade by cutting off the demand, working with
governments to help them enforce the laws governing animal trafficking under the
Cites Convention. (Its work is now so well known that foreign governments
themselves typically make the approach to Monkey World for advice and support.)
Everything they said chimed with Hermer's own ideas about balancing animal
rescue with compassion for the humans caught up in an illegal trade.
'Jez may not believe in fate, but I do,' says Alison, 41. 'To meet such a
kindred soul, which was abundantly clear even over the satellite phone from
Sierra Leone, was our good fortune. Here was a person who believed, as we did,
that individuals matter and that, when you decide to take something on, you do
it wholeheartedly.'
On his post-operational leave, the Cronins asked Hermer to do some
investigative work for the sanctuary - first in Italy, and then in Vietnam,
where he tried to trace the illegal animal smuggling routes from the jungles to
Ho Chi Minh City. Hermer had the advantage of being able to gather information
by posing as a tourist on a moped.
In 2003 Jim Cronin asked Hermer to be a trustee of Monkey World. 'I agreed
but then more or less forgot about it,' Hermer says. 'I never suspected there
would be any requirement to fulfil the duties of a trustee.' Hermer was still in
the Marines but increasingly disillusioned over his men's deployment in
Afghanistan, where he spent five months until last January.
'I felt to my core,' he says, 'that we were not being supported politically
and after months of serving in Helmand province I simply could not answer the
question: what were we doing there? There was no real moral component that I
could see. I was commanding more than 100 guys out there, asking them to risk
their lives for an objective I couldn't explain.
'They were brave as lions. I was immensely proud of them but they were being
asked to do things without proper resources and were being pushed beyond the
limits. They were faced with doing tours back-to-back, six months on and six
months off, for the next three years. It was the catalyst for my resignation.'
A week after resigning, in February 2007, Jez Hermer received a telephone
call from Jim Cronin in Australia. 'Hermer, I've got cancer,' he said,
extracting a promise that, if anything were to go wrong, he would help Alison.
Cronin hoped that, after a course of chemotherapy, he would be strong enough to
return home and explain everything to the staff at Monkey World. Alison was
sworn to secrecy. They were told he had 'family business' to attend to in New
York. A few weeks later, Cronin
died of liver cancer at the Cabrini Medical Centre in Manhattan. He was 55.
By another coincidence, Hermer was serving his notice at Bovington Camp, just
down the road from Monkey World. He was commanding the Royal Marines Armoured
Support Company, which he had founded. It fell to him to tell the sanctuary's
100 staff that their founder and inspiration was dead but that his work would go
on. 'There will be a huge hole in Alison's life, but she will carry on their
work,' he reassured them.
Conservationists worldwide knew they had lost a rare and passionate
campaigner. To Monkey World's huge and sometimes obsessive fan base, Cronin's
death was devastating and the hundreds of overwrought messages posted on the web
at this time conveyed a sense not just of personal pain, but also that primate
welfare had suffered a serious setback. People wanted reassurance.
'To me,' Alison says, 'it was just one of the oddest things: people asking if
I would carry on the work. It made me think they didn't get us or understand us
or our relationship, or what we do.'
Alison asked Hermer to join Monkey World, not knowing he had already decided
to leave the Marines in favour of running his own contract business in the
Middle East, because she knew he shared their ideals, not just for primate
protection but for animal welfare and conservation generally. In November Hermer
took over as Monkey World's operations director.
One of his first tasks will be to oversee the arrival of 36 capuchin monkeys
from Santiago, which have been kept for up to 20 years in laboratory cages as
part of a contraceptive research programme. He is just back from overseeing one
of Monkey World's most ambitious ventures - an ape rescue centre and
conservation project on the uninhabited river island of Tien in Vietnam's Cat
Tien National Park. Monkey World is working with the Vietnam government to
create a semi-wild enclosure where monkeys that have been abused or isolated can
be paired up, taught to forage and regain their normal way of life.
Two of the Dorset sanctuary's gibbons, Peanut and Pung-Yo, who were captured
in Vietnamese forest and traded to Taiwan as pets, are destined to return there,
with their first offspring, Tien. 'It was a hugely convoluted and expensive
exercise,' Hermer says. 'But that is conservation in action - replacing genetic
stock in its place of origin.'
Monkey World is a rescue centre, not a zoo. As Alison says, 'We're not trying
to put our noses in the air. But there isn't a zoo in the world that would have
60 chimpanzees and would be prepared to organise the rescue of number 61. It
doesn't make financial sense. My 60th chimp did not make a load more people want
to come to this park. We do it because it's what we do here. We have four groups
of chimpanzees and some day in the future, the way the world is going, we may
have to have five.'
Despite its success, Monkey World can never take more than a tiny fraction of
the animals that need help, and has to be highly selective. The centre is
limited by the size of the park and by financial constraints - it has no
government funding or grants and relies on legacies, donations, animal
'adoptions' and the usual round of fundraising. A primate hospital at the park
is still not in use because acquiring the necessary equipment (one of its
greatest needs is a digital X-ray machine) is a slow and costly process.
Though still distressed by Jim's death, Alison says she derives comfort from
Monkey World and its residents. 'Jim's is an impossible role for anyone to fill.
He was larger than life when it came to character, personality and passion for
primates.
'We are all stepping up to take on a bit of that load. One of the greatest
tasks Jez has on his plate is getting used to the cast of characters that are
the humans at Monkey World. The animals are a doddle.'
A chimpanzee at the Monkey World sanctuary, which provides shelter for more
than 150 rescued primates
