A Mississippi monkey sanctuary helps veterans with PTSD find peace
'Being out here has brought a lot of faith back to me,' said John Richard. 'There's no feeling like it.'
The bond began last fall when Richard was helping two married veterans set up the Gulf Coast Primate Sanctuary, volunteering his time to build the enclosure that's now Louie's home in rural southeast Mississippi.
During a recent visit, Louie quickly scampered up Richard's body, wrapping his arms and tail around him in a sort of hug. Richard, in turn, placed his hand on the primate's back and whispered sweetly until Louie disentangled himself and swung away.
'He's making his little sounds in my ear, and you know, he's always telling you, 'Oh, I love you,'' Richard said. ''I know you're OK. I know you're not going to hurt me.''
Richard said his connection with Louie helped more than any other PTSD treatment he received since being diagnosed more than 20 years ago.
It's a similar story for the sanctuary's founder, April Stewart, an Air Force veteran who said she developed PTSD as a result of military sexual trauma.
'It was destroying my life. It was like a cancer,' she said. 'It was a trauma that was never properly healed.'
Stewart's love of animals was a way to cope. She didn't necessarily set out to create a place of healing for veterans with PTSD, but that's what the sanctuary has become for some volunteers.
'By helping the primates learning to trust, we're also reteaching ourselves how to trust, and we're giving ourselves grace with people,' she said.
Her 15-acre property, nestled amid woods and farmland, is filled with rescue dogs, two rather noisy geese and a black cat. It's also now home to three spider monkeys, two squirrel monkeys and two kinkajous, a tropical mammal that is closely related to raccoons.
The sanctuary in the town of Perkinston, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) due north of the Gulf coast, includes three large enclosures for the different species. Each has a smaller, air-conditioned area and a large fenced-in outdoor zone, where the primates swing from platforms and lounge in the sun. Checking on the animals — changing their blankets, bringing food and water — is one of the first and last things Stewart does each day.
However, she can't do it alone. She relies on a group of volunteers for help, including several other veterans, and hopes to open the sanctuary to the public next summer for guided educational tours.
Stewart and her husband, also a veteran, decided to open the sanctuary in October after first rescuing and rehoming monkeys. With the help of two exotic-animal veterinarians, they formed a foundation that governs the sanctuary — which she said is the only primate sanctuary in Mississippi licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and ensures the animals will be cared for even when the Stewarts are no longer able to run it themselves.
All the animals were once somebody's pet, but their owners eventually couldn't take care of them. Stewart stressed that primates do not make good or easy pets. They need lots of space and socialization, which is often difficult for families to provide.
The sanctuary's goal is to provide as natural a habitat as possible for the animals, Stewart said, and bring them together with their own species.
'This is their family,' she said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
43 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell review
My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend's house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn't. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I'd had a brush with the uncanny. When Times journalist Ben Machell's dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain's most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. His answering machine filled up with pleas to investigate strange happenings around the country: a trawlerman mauled by an invisible hound, a house that bled water, a rural bungalow plagued by fires and expiring pets. Machell has honoured Cornell with an entrancing biography. Drawing on boxes of tapes and documents, an unpublished memoir and interviews with relatives and contemporaries, he hears 'the steady voice of a rational man methodically tapping the wall between reality and something else'. Cornell's approach was approvingly described as 'probing-doubt': curious without being credulous, sensitive yet rigorous. In 1977, he clashed with two SPR colleagues over the infamous Enfield poltergeist: a hoax, he decided, but they got a bestselling book out of it while Cornell's work, Machell writes, was largely 'unheralded, unrewarded and appreciated only by a small group of people'. Machell's elegantly thrilling yarn encompasses the broad history of paranormal research in the UK. In the middle of the 19th century, the tension between science and religion inspired a craze for 'proof' of life after death in the form of spiritualism – seances, clairvoyants, automatic writing – and a subsequent desire to assess its veracity. The SPR was founded in 1882, in a 'spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry'. Its members, including Lewis Carroll, future prime minister Arthur Balfour and psychologist William James, pioneered concepts such as telepathy and ectoplasm while exposing fraudulent mediums and 'spirit photographers'. The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author's nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm. A poltergeist, for example, might actually be 'recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis' – the violent discharge of mental energy by the living. Rhine's secular approach appealed to Soviet materialists, who explored telepathy as a potential cold war weapon. The physiologist Leonid Vasiliev, whom Tony Cornell visited in Leningrad in 1962, possibly at the behest of MI6, claimed that explaining extrasensory perception would be as significant as discovering atomic energy. The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group's rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King's Carrie, Cornell's mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted. Even as he exposed numerous instances of mischief, attention-seeking and hallucination, he personally encountered a handful of phenomena that defied rational explanation. It was a mind-boggling experience in postwar India, too good to spoil here, that set him on this path in the first place. He still sought answers. During the 1990s, to his surprise, Cornell's answering machine fell silent. He wondered whether conspiracy theories had supplanted the paranormal in the public imagination, or perhaps digital distractions had dulled our receptivity to psychic disturbances. But had he not died in 2010, he would have seen a new generation of ghost hunters do a roaring trade on YouTube, where there is no financial incentive for his brand of cautious analysis. As Dingwall feared, entertainment has trumped genuine investigation. Like many a biographer, Machell falls half in love with his subject. Cornell was respected within the SPR for his diplomacy and his 'consistent willingness to be wrong'. Parapsychology may not be widely accepted as a branch of science, but Cornell had a true scientist's commitment to doubt and impartiality. At a time when beliefs leave facts in the dust, it's easy to share Machell's admiration for a man who was willing to say: 'I don't know.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural by Ben Machell is published by Abacus (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy from Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell review
My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend's house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn't. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I'd had a brush with the uncanny. When Times journalist Ben Machell's dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain's most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. His answering machine filled up with pleas to investigate strange happenings around the country: a trawlerman mauled by an invisible hound, a house that bled water, a rural bungalow plagued by fires and expiring pets. Machell has honoured Cornell with an entrancing biography. Drawing on boxes of tapes and documents, an unpublished memoir and interviews with relatives and contemporaries, he hears 'the steady voice of a rational man methodically tapping the wall between reality and something else'. Cornell's approach was approvingly described as 'probing-doubt': curious without being credulous, sensitive yet rigorous. In 1977, he clashed with two SPR colleagues over the infamous Enfield poltergeist: a hoax, he decided, but they got a bestselling book out of it while Cornell's work, Machell writes, was largely 'unheralded, unrewarded and appreciated only by a small group of people'. Machell's elegantly thrilling yarn encompasses the broad history of paranormal research in the UK. In the middle of the 19th century, the tension between science and religion inspired a craze for 'proof' of life after death in the form of spiritualism – seances, clairvoyants, automatic writing – and a subsequent desire to assess its veracity. The SPR was founded in 1882, in a 'spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry'. Its members, including Lewis Carroll, future prime minister Arthur Balfour and psychologist William James, pioneered concepts such as telepathy and ectoplasm while exposing fraudulent mediums and 'spirit photographers'. The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author's nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm. A poltergeist, for example, might actually be 'recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis' – the violent discharge of mental energy by the living. Rhine's secular approach appealed to Soviet materialists, who explored telepathy as a potential cold war weapon. The physiologist Leonid Vasiliev, whom Tony Cornell visited in Leningrad in 1962, possibly at the behest of MI6, claimed that explaining extrasensory perception would be as significant as discovering atomic energy. The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group's rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King's Carrie, Cornell's mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted. Even as he exposed numerous instances of mischief, attention-seeking and hallucination, he personally encountered a handful of phenomena that defied rational explanation. It was a mind-boggling experience in postwar India, too good to spoil here, that set him on this path in the first place. He still sought answers. During the 1990s, to his surprise, Cornell's answering machine fell silent. He wondered whether conspiracy theories had supplanted the paranormal in the public imagination, or perhaps digital distractions had dulled our receptivity to psychic disturbances. But had he not died in 2010, he would have seen a new generation of ghost hunters do a roaring trade on YouTube, where there is no financial incentive for his brand of cautious analysis. As Dingwall feared, entertainment has trumped genuine investigation. Like many a biographer, Machell falls half in love with his subject. Cornell was respected within the SPR for his diplomacy and his 'consistent willingness to be wrong'. Parapsychology may not be widely accepted as a branch of science, but Cornell had a true scientist's commitment to doubt and impartiality. At a time when beliefs leave facts in the dust, it's easy to share Machell's admiration for a man who was willing to say: 'I don't know.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural by Ben Machell is published by Abacus (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy from Delivery charges may apply.
Reuters
10 hours ago
- Reuters
Union Pacific train derails in Texas, no hazardous material leaks
Aug 12 (Reuters) - A Union Pacific Railroad (UNP.N), opens new tab train derailed two miles east of Gordon, Texas, on Tuesday, the company said, and emergency responders said the derailed cars did not appear to be leaking their contents. The emergency responders in Palo Pinto County said that, nonetheless, the derailment was "being treated as a HazMat situation." "At about 2 p.m. CDT today, approximately 35 Union Pacific cars derailed," the company said in a statement. It was not clear what caused the derailment just outside Gordon, a town with a population of 460 located about 95 miles (153 kilometers) west of Dallas. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what materials were being carried in the derailed cars. Officials with the Palo Pinto County Emergency Services District 1 said the derailment had sparked some small grass fires, which firefighters were working to control. "At this time, there are no confirmed hazardous material leaks," the emergency officials wrote on social media. They said that nobody was hurt in the incident and all railroad personnel had been accounted for. The railroad said additional crews were in transit and an incident investigation was underway.
