Pet: OUT

It was four or five months ago the last time we had a pet in the house. For more than five years we had a female monkey. A macaque. Just a ‘kampung’ monkey, the ones people have for ‘topeng monyet’ shows, but a unique one. It (yes, it. I refuse to address it as ‘she’ as it would be too human) never recognized its masters, always play favorite. Affe (my name for it, as everybody else in the fam gave it different name) is a big fan of my dad, #2 would be my bro, then came the rest of the world where male species had better rank than the female. Affe will only be nice to me when there’s nobody around. In occasions my bro showed up it’ll get fierce at me and ready to scratch me with its claws. Fun to mess up with its mind too, just pretend hitting my bro it’ll get all crazy and noisy and obviously mad at me.. hehee.. stupid monkey all caught up with jealousy & thought could ‘save’ my bro from me.

Observing the monkey could be interesting, if I don’t have to suffer getting scratched, so I prefer to pet it when nobody’s around. Most of the time, just teased it a bit and ignored it. I know this guy whose biggest passion is the monkey business and spent a year in Kalimantan doing research on macaques. Once in a flight to Lombok he explained endlessly the different kinds of monkey and their attitude and/or characteristics; and that helped me understood it’s nature and how to deal with it.

Extradition was its unfortunate fate. One afternoon it got lose (again). We were unaware of it ‘til dad heard noise outside the house and discovered it was threatening an older lady (a neighbor) who was just passing by. I don’t think it was going to attack the lady but she was all terrified and warned us to do something about it or she would have to report the incident to the police. Well, dad has considered to get rid of it, so decided it was high time to stop all the trouble, threats, destruction, etc etc. So that same day dad took it in the car and brought to some place. Until this minute none of us know where dad dumped it. Do I miss Affe? Maybe a bit, coz at times I come home to an empty house at least it was there. Pooh.