NEWS -PRIMATE PALACE OPENS AT AUSTIN, TEXAS ZOO

Primate Palace opens at Austin Zoo

  By Ben Wear AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Makayla, like anyone moving into new and strange living quarters, seemed a bit shaken by the experience Saturday.
She huddled under what appeared to be her favorite gray blankie and peered nervously at a visitor through the wire of her cage. Makayla, you see, is a capushin monkey who, like a dozen or so of her simian friends, is spending her first days in the Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary's new Primate Palace.
On Saturday, the rescue zoo, in Oak Hill near U.S. 290, celebrated the opening of the $102,000 revamped former pony barn. The small wood-frame building over the past three years had to be re-leveled, repainted (including a mural on one side), outfitted with several monkey "bedrooms" inside and expanded to the west with large outdoor cages for the residents.
Openings in the palace wall allow the monkeys to move at their leisure between the heated indoors (or air-conditioned, as the seasons demand) and the cages outdoors with ropes and platforms for climbing.
Dozens of zoo-goers gathered outside those cages on the brisk but pleasant afternoon as head zookeeper Sara King and primate expert Kelly Todd talked about the monkeys and how they came to live in the Hill Country.
The facility is a rescue zoo, one that does not seek out animals for display but rather accepts animals surrendered by civilian owners (including a lion that was living with an over-the-road trucker), given up by research or medical facilities, or captured by agencies like the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Donna King, a capuchin so named for a hairdo that resembles boxing promoter Don King's wild locks, had been a test subject for psychotropic drugs in an earlier life, zoo Executive Director Patti Clark said. Despite having been at the zoo for quite a while, Ms. King has never been able to grow back much of her coat, Clark said.
But most of the zoo's 30 or so primates, and the other 300 or so big cats, bears, foxes, birds and other animals at the sanctuary, looked hale Saturday.
The sanctuary, after a rough few years of lax management, poor morale and sometimes surly customer service under its previous owners, now has a $900,000 annual budget, a larger donor base and 15 full-time employees, Clark said.
"It's all about giving these (animals) a better opportunity than they had before," Todd said.