OUR EARLIEST SPACE TRAVELERS

Miss Baker

In Huntsville, Ala., there is an unusual grave site where, instead of flowers, people sometimes leave bananas.

The gravestone reads: ”Miss Baker, squirrel monkey, first U.S. animal to fly in space and return alive. May 28, 1959.”

Fifty years ago, when Baker made her famous flight, she had some company in the nose cone of the Jupiter ballistic missile: a rhesus monkey named Able.MORE [National Public Radio (NPR)May 28, 2009]

Yesterday when I was looking for a photograph of a squirrel monkey to post on The Cat’s Meow, I found one on Wikipedia along with a photograph of Miss Baker (I had the gender wrong on yesterday’s post), one of our earliest astronauts. I hadn’t thought about our monkey astronauts in years, but remember reading about them as a kid and feeling angry that they were used without having a choice in the matter. Miss Baker (an eleven-ounce Peruvian-born squirrel monkey) and her companion, Able (a seven-pound American-born rhesus), were the first to come back alive. Miss Baker lived to be twenty-seven and died of kidney failure. Able died four days after the landing. She developed an infection after having an electrode removed.  Able is preserved and on display at the Smithsonian‘s National Air and Space Museum. I find this also disturbing. Am I the only one?

The U.S. wasn’t the only country to shoot animals into space. Russia and France did as well. Both the Russians and the Americans also sent up mice.

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A sweet little squirrel monkey

enjoying the relative freedom of the Fuji Safari Park in Japan.

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Video uploaded to YouTube by iafastro.

Photo credits ~ Grave stone by Ms. Miserable via Find a Grave. The photo of Able on her couch in display at the National Air and Space Museum is by RadioFan (talk) under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License via Wikipedia. The monkey in Fuji Safari Park is in the public domain and via Wikipedia. Ms. Baker’s photo is in the public domain and via the U.S. Federal Governent.

THEY’LL PASS ON THE JELL-O

Video uploaded by WCSMedia. In the Bronx Zoos Monkey House, squirrel monkeys receive a holiday treat unlike anything they’ve seen-or felt-before. Keepers offer them Jell-O with blueberries, a jiggly concoction that immediately stimulates their foraging instincts. Come visit the monkeys during daily primate training demonstrations at 2:30 p.m.

“Ha! Ha! They’re too smart to eat food that is just empty calories. Puts them one up on the humans …”

Indeed it does. Darling little things and dexterous too … Squirrel monkeys come from Central and South America and they are not on the endangered species list.

This little guy was something of a celebrity. His name was Baker. He was the astronaut who rode the Jupiter IRBM into space in 1959 and came home safely.

The photos below are from the U.S. Army, hence they are in the public domain.

Baker:

The Jupiter IRBM:

NO ORDINARY ZOO

Video uploaded by b22mat55.

“We don’t mind zoos when they do the right thing. Dignity and freedom are key…”

We wouldn’t know a thing about “Ireland‘s Wildest Attraction,” Fota Wildlife Park if it weren’t for Olivia O’Brien’s blog featured this week on WordPress’ Freshly Pressed. Ms. O’Brien’s photographs were so lovely that we had to research the source of her inspiration. Fota Wildlife Park is home to some seventy species of animals from around the world and a top ten visitor attraction in Ireland, not that we’d know. It’s on their website. It looks like a definite go-to place should you find yourself in Ireland around Cork.

Fota Wildlife Park was opened in 1983. Located in the south of Ireland, in County Cork, the park is set on 75 acres (300,000 m²), and is home to nearly 30 mammal and 50 bird species. Many of the animals roam freely with the visitors, such as the ring-tailed lemurs and squirrel monkeys. The larger animals, including the giraffe and bison, live in spacious paddocks with unobtrusive barriers. This allows visitors to enjoy an up close and personal experience with the animals.

Fota Wildlife Park aims to be a leading contributor to the conservation of wildlife through conservation education, the breeding of endangered species and the promotion of conservation worldwide. MORE [Wikipedia]

Free Ranging Ring Tailed Lemur courtesy of Talks Presenters 09 (talk) licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Photograph and conservation status via Wikipedia.