IT is interesting that John Blunt (LET, August 23) should so quickly change his stance on Mrs Mary Stanton's capuchin monkey, Joe.
Hardly giving us time to forget his previous remarks, he now employs the soppy, romantic reasoning of an animal liberationist.
Karl Loreny, a most distinguished animal behaviourist, has said that it is not necessarily cruel to keep an animal in a cage.
To say, as did John Blunt, that Joe would have trees to climb and other monkeys to play with sounds fine, but this would not provide the happiness that it seems to imply. Joe will now be so humanised that his responses to monkey society will no longer be adequate and he would be a miserable outcast, bullied by all.
Even if kept in a cage on his own, his separation from Mrs Stanton after so many years of her company and care would most probably prove detrimental to his health.
Either way could be a death sentence for Joe.
JULIAN PILLING, Railway Street, Nelson.
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