TIGER STYLE: Melia, a trained macaque adorned with stripes of dyed fur, grooms her Bedey owner.LYNN JOHNSON
About a decade ago, Lisa Jones-Engel was traveling through rural Bangladesh in a caravan of colleagues she calls “Team Monkey,” a band of international researchers comprising a veterinarian, her husband (a physician/epidemiologist), zoologists from Jahangirnagar University, her daughters/field assistants, and others. The group had been collecting macaque feces as part of a project with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to understand how picornaviruses may be moving between humans and monkeys in the region. As the travelers turned off a paved road to head toward the village of Dhamrai, they drove past a man walking a monkey painted with tiger stripes.
“I thought, ‘What the hell was that?’” Jones-Engel, an anthropologist and primatologist at the University of Washington, recalls. The caravan stopped and ...
