Primates are extremely social intelligent animal, and the keeping of them in captivity is a huge shame, recently there has been an increase in amount of primates that are kept as pets. Doing a search on the internet I found lots of adverts for primates as pets, the smaller new world primates are the most common to be kept as pets, many adverts for marmosets, squirrel monkeys, tamarins and capuchins are on the internet. In the rest of Europe primates are not allowed to be kept as pets, in the UK it is required to have a dangerous wild animal licence in order to keep a primate, but in none of the adverts I saw on the internet did I see a reference to this. Primates are social and many of the pets are kept alone and so can't socially bond and can become depressed. The required veterinary care is usually not available or very expensive for members of the general public. I also saw an advert for a cotton topped tamarin which is critically endangered being offered for a pet with no mention of the legislation that would be required in order to keep it as a pet as well as being sold as an individual pet. We should tell the government that it is unacceptable for primates to be kept as pets in the UK.
