Rogue simian: Friend or foe?

Editor’s note: What you see below originally appeared March 5, 2010 on the now-defunct Browser Blog for Freep.com, the website of the Detroit Free Press. It was inspired by reports of an escaped rhesus monkey in Florida which somehow managed to evade recapture. Slow news day, obviously, which made it a moment for levity in which I referenced monkey characters I’d seen or read about in my childhood.

So there’s a monkey on the loose in Florida. It’s one of the small ones, like the kind we saw in those 90s movies about evil monkeys giving people astonishing plagues.

I’m torn. I don’t know if I should be on its side or not. Curious George taught me that monkeys can be foolish: swallowing a hard block puzzle piece, getting into a car with a stranger in a yellow hat — you can’t trust a monkey like that not to get into mischief we humans will rue.

The flying primates in the Wizard of Oz taught me that if monkeys could talk for real, they wouldn’t necessarily be friendly like that silly little George. They might kidnap lone girls — and their little dogs, too.

But maybe it’s a good monkey. Maybe it’s like Virgil from Project X, and a lookalike of a young Matthew Broderick has helped him escape from the clutches of nefarious scientists.

Or, it could be on a mission, like Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, and his partner Marta.

What we know about the rogue simian: It appears to run at a speed approaching that of light itself, and according to monkey trapper Vernon Yates, it isn’t fazed by tranquilizers. Two hits from the tranq gun didn’t slow him down one bit.

“What we’re really doing is turning him into a drug addict,” Yates said in this news video on 10Connects.com in Tampa Bay.

This is looking ominous, people.

Authorities spent five hours chasing it. If these audio recordings from a police scanner are anything to go by — searchers included a one-armed hunter with two dogs prepared to sniff — then the authorities may not be able to catch it anytime soon.

Its range is wide for a creature no bigger than a small child. Sightings of it span Tampa and St. Petersburg, two cities I know are close together based on the occasions I switched planes at their airports. Plus the monkey visited some other places I have never heard of in Florida, but are presumably in the vicinity of those two cities.

Our only hope of tracking it may be with its Facebook fans. At least two pages have sprung up so far, “Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay” and “Go Monkey Go,” and the proprietors of those sites appear to have insight into the beast’s state of mind. They know it’s a he, and he likes bananas — conforming to stereotype, as opposed to Zira, a non-conformist chimp who loathed bananas. And he likes to “mess with the popo” by making insouciant taunts such as “you’ll never catch me, suckas!”

I am confident a crack team a là Criminal Minds can work up a good psych profile from those postings, and maybe soon I'll have my answer of just whose side I'm on.