DELIA AKELEY & THE MONKEY

By telling this story, Iain McCalman illuminates much about human-animal relations and the tyranny of gender inequality. He reinstates a twentieth century story of a dedicated amateur primatologist and her adopted Vervet monkey.

On an East-African hunting expedition in 1909, Delia Akeley, a forty-year-old American woman, casually captured a baby female monkey, never dreaming this act would overturn both their lives. Delia's life was isolated and often lonely in an overpoweringly masculine world. She decided to name the monkey JT Jr and study her interactions with humans; a long-frustrated desire to adopt a child led her to also lose her heart to this lovable animal.

This relationship with a feisty, intelligent Vervet unlocked Delia's latent talents of research and observation, anticipating both Jane Goodall's chimpanzee writings and Margaret Mead's Samoan ethnographies. It illuminates much about human-animal relations and the tyranny of gender inequality by reinstating an obscured story of a dedicated amateur primatologist.

Delia's love for JT clashed with her husband Carl Akeley's obsession to create a temple of African wildlife dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Nursing his broken body and his elephant mania pushed Delia into a breakdown in Uganda, a savage divorce in Manhattan, and the heart-breaking caging of JT in a Washington zoo. Carl's death triggered a long battle between Delia and his jealous widow, who succeeded in obliterating most of Delia's achievements. Iain McCalman uses records, official and informal, to build a story of passionate love and hate among women, men, animals and museums that predates our times but speaks to our present.