15,000 captive macaques. One naive 22-year-old vet tech. A summer you couldn’t make up if you tried.

Nobody warns you what to do when a full grown rhesus with two-inch fangs and a 350-pound bite decides to charge.

In the summer of 1995, twenty-two-year-old Jeff Pennington took a job as a veterinary technician at a sprawling primate breeding facility in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Within weeks he found himself alone in a corral, net in hand, learning exactly what the fight-or-flight instinct means. And that was a normal Tuesday.

There was also the pre-dawn boat ride to an island home to thousands of free-ranging rhesus macaques, where he stitched wounds in an open-air field hospital, then watched a groggy monkey wake up and stagger off looking exactly like a human nursing a hangover. There was the off-the-clock house call to a real Frank Lloyd Wright estate home to a pet lynx, three zebras, and a newly arrived pygmy hippopotamus that charged out of her pond like a torpedo.

Monkey Farm: A Summer Among the Macaques is the memoir of that season. A wild workplace comedy and the quiet coming-of-age story of a homesick kid who has to figure out, fast, what he's actually made of.

Part This Is Going to Hurt, part All Creatures Great and Small, it's a story about the work that shapes us before we understand ourselves. Monkey Farm is proof that some of the strangest corners of American life are hiding in plain sight. You just have to sign up to feed the monkeys.

Jeff Pennington

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