Well, this is a place that I know very well, have visited there and made many donations UNTIL.... I found out that Colleen Layton is not who she says she is. She started out as strictly a Wildlife sanctuary and then she took it upon herself to start with a pet monkey, a few weeks old who performed for her and from there the monkeys have multiplied. She was told years ago to get rid of the monkeys they were not allowed there, but she refused to do so. Why is Colleen Layton excused from falling the law?
When the neighbors moved in they didn't have any monkeys so it's not as though they "KNEW" there were dangerous animals living right next door.
Colleen Layton says she has cameras everywhere. Does she have them in the neighborhood for when one of the monkeys escapes? I doubt it. It's not will one of them escape it's when they will escape. Lets just say that in the evening teenagers think it would be cool to go in and see the monkeys. They approach one of the cages (because some don't have a perimeter fence around them, and even if they did they could certainly climb it), and one gets attacked through the cage? How good are the cameras then? People do invade on others properties as in a recent case where the father lifted his little boy over a fence to see the monkeys and he was seriously hurt. The law is actually thinking about pressing charges against the father.
Collen Layton says that all of the weight for the monkeys combined is 263 lbs. That just goes to show how little Colleen knows. It is NOT the weight of a monkey that is dangerous, it is their ability to attack. They are fast, they jump far, they are small, they have long canine teeth and it is their normal behaviour to attack when they feel threatened. A Threat to a monkey can be as simple as someone walking by and the monkey gets afraid. I use to volunteer for a small zoo and because of some of the set ups on the cages, I had to go in with them to feed and clean. I never had any problems until one day. One day when a capuchin monkey decided I was a threat. The monkey jumped about 15 feet onto my shoulder and grabbed a hold of my ear and wouldn't let go. I grabbed the monkey by the head and ripped him off of me and threw him on the floor. I ran out as fast as I could. This monkey had ripped the top part of my ear in half!!!!!! In a matter of minutes and I do know monkey behaviour. What if one of Colleens monkeys get out and approachs someone that knows nothing at all about monkeys? They don't just bite one time and leave, they are rapid biters, they will bit over and over again. I had 15 years with monkeys and this is their normal behaviour.
Colleen Layton also says that they will be put down if they have to leave. THAT IS SUCH A LIE!!!!!! There are sanctuaries that have room and would be more than glad to take them in. I would be willing to take on the job of finding homes for them, that's how sure I am. Colleen is playing on the heartstrings of animal lovers. She is not what she says she is and she has no business having primates where primates are not allowed to be, PERIOD. Why shouldn't she have to abide by the same laws as everyone else?????
Before you read the article on Colleen Layton I found an article that came out today about what I was saying about escapes. This monkey was 21 years old and had been living with these people for the 21 years. I bet the owners never expected this monkey to get out. No humans were hurt, but the monkey died. Shame on people for having them in the first place!
I had a monkey that I use to give magazines to because she loved to look at the photos. This one time I missed a staple in the magazine. I noticed later on that she was playing with her padlock. I went over to see what she was doing and she had pulled the staple out of the magazine and had it in the lock trying to pick the lock. Monkeys are very smart and when they are locked up in jail all they think about is getting out. Every time I went in and out of my chimps cage Mikey would pull on all three locks on the door to check and see if I had forgotten one. We are humans, we make mistakes, though when we make a mistake with a primates cage trouble only follows...
BELLEVIEW — Whenever the Ferson family went to the movies, they had to bring back a bag of popcorn for Dexter, a 21-year-old Capuchin monkey.
Dexter is shown with family friend Ashley Karzmarsky in this family snapshot. (Submitted photo) Dexter was a popular attraction in the neighborhood where he lived.
He also was an escape artist.
On Tuesday, the monkey somehow escaped his cage and traveled into a fenced yard, where he died following an encounter with a Rottweiler.
The monkey, which weighed between 10 and 15 pounds and stood about 26 inches tall, had escaped twice before. Three times, someone damaged his 6 ½- foot tall by 12-foot wide wooden cage, which had bars around it and fencing.
Shortly before 1 p.m. Tuesday, Dale Ferson came home and noticed the monkey's cage was open and Dexter was missing. The padlock used to lock the cage door also was missing.
"We're having a hard time with his loss," Ferson said.
Ferson said Dexter came to their family when he was 17 weeks old, on Christmas Eve in 1989. The 59-year-old man said Dexter, who had been abused, was a gift for his wife.
At the time, the family was living in south Florida. They moved to Belleview in November 1995.
While he was with them, Ferson said, Dexter was part of the family and grew up with his five children and 10 grandchildren.
Ferson said the monkey loved finding a sharp object to put in the lock on his cage in an attempt to open it.
"It was a fun thing for him to do," Ferson said.
The same deputy who responded to Tuesday's incident noted in his report that two years ago he worked a similar call involving Dexter's escape, and it was determined then that the animal had gone through a hole at the back of the cage.
While investigating Tuesday, Dexter was seen not far away. Rushing to the area, Ferson, the deputy and several neighbors saw the monkey on top of a roof. Several attempts to lure him to the ground failed, and he ran off.
"He's hard to catch because he's so fast," Ferson said.
Ferson told the deputy that Dexter normally would return home at nightfall.
Roughly a half hour after everyone had left the scene, Ferson called the deputy to tell him that Dexter had been captured by a Rottweiler and was killed.
The dog was inside a 6-foot privacy fence.
Ferson said Dexter was cremated and his remains will be placed on top of the fireplace, next to his favorite stuffed animal, a monkey.
Colleens Story;
Jamie, the so-called barroom-brawling monkey of Glen Burnie, seems pretty mellow now. As he munches popcorn in his enclosure at Frisky's Wildlife & Primate Sanctuary in Howard County there's no sign of the agitated bonnet macaque who made headlines in 1999.
Back then, Jamie used to be taken all sorts of places by his owner, a used car dealer who would often encourage people to touch his monkey. When Jamie scratched a waitress at the Speak Easy Inn in Glen Burnie, all hell broke loose, with customers throwing punches left and right. Animal control confiscated Jamie and placed him at Frisky's, a refuge in Woodstock run by Colleen Layton-Robbins. He's been there ever since.
"Jamie doesn't like when people laugh at him," reads the little bio of the monkey on the Frisky's Web site.
No one does, Jamie. No one does.
Every animal at Frisky's has a story. "Izzy was the product of a lesbian divorce," Colleen says of a white-faced capuchin monkey named Isadora. Oogie, another capuchin, used to belong to a dentist. That was until the dentist's wife said, "That monkey's not going to ruin another Christmas." Kiko, a rhesus macaque, was given up by his human family in Iowa after he started biting people. His former owner visits Frisky's annually, sleeping on a cot across from Kiko's cage.
Colleen has taken in primates from across the country. She has 23 in her house and in enclosures across her three-acre property.
It's not just monkeys. There's a bald eagle that's recuperating after someone shot it. ("He was a pile of wet feathers when he came in," Colleen says.) In the rabbit room are a clutch of baby bunnies, rescued from a hoarding situation. There are pygmy goats, minks, chinchilla, parrots, squirrels, all tended by Colleen and an army of volunteers.
Frisky's doesn't happen to have any alligators, but the toothy reptiles come through the door periodically, usually confiscated during drug busts. "They're small alligators, but they're alligators," says Colleen, 56. "Talk about some spunky attitude."
When Colleen moved here 20 years ago, she was pretty much surrounded by farmland. "They said they weren't going to develop," she says. Today, parts of the new Preserve at Waverly Glen subdivision back up to Frisky's. Peer over the fence near the coatimundis (a sort of South American raccoon) and you can look into the back yards of $1 million homes.
And on the other side of Frisky's live Julianne and Richard Wyckoff. They've been waging a battle against Colleen since they moved in12 years ago. Julianne says that when she and her husband bought their house, they didn't know how diverse the wildlife in and around their neighbor's home was. "I thought she was a housewife who had some animals, some cats and llamas," Julianne says.
Monkeys, say the Wyckoffs, especially macaques, are prone to herpes B, a disease that can be fatal in humans. "I have a daughter who wants to be out roller skating and bike riding," Julianne said. "I let her do that, but I worry all the time. I say, 'If you see anything, you run to the house.' "
Colleen says the animals are healthy. Her enclosures are double-locked, and 27 closed-circuit TV cameras are trained on the property. Besides, she says, the combined weight of all her monkeys is just 263 pounds, hardly a threat.
The fight over Frisky's has dragged on in zoning hearings and courtrooms and even reached Maryland's highest court - which sent it back to the county. Years ago Colleen was successful in her request for a zoning exception allowing her property to be a sanctuary for squirrels, bunnies, goats, hawks and the like. The sticking point is the exotic animals. There's a hearing Thursday before the county's Board of Appeals and another March 24. At issue is whether she can keep the monkeys.
"Really, they don't belong on this property," Julianne says. "Zoning laws are there for a reason."
Colleen says she thinks she's there for a reason, too: to care for animals that haven't gotten a fair shake. "I'm not the problem," Colleen says. "I'm the solution." The solution to abandoned, unwanted or neglected animals.
Jamie, the barroom-brawling monkey of Glen Burnie, is content to sit this fight out. As with pretty much everything else in his life, the humans will decide what happens next.
Story credit
here
