Biologists believe a TikTok-famous monkey was taken from a South Florida colony. His owner says he was rescued from a lab
A vervet monkey who some scientists are claiming was taken from South Florida’s Dania Beach colony is now starring in TikTok videos that show him on the loose in Walmart, eating Pringles and chicken wings, and breaking televisions in hotel rooms.
The videos have been viewed over a hundred million times. The scientists are not happy about it.
The TikTok account is called Thabo and Ray, named for the approximately 5-year-old monkey and his owner, 31-year-old Kim Raymond Feaste. Feaste says in his videos that he rescued the baby monkey from a lab in Las Vegas where his mother was killed, but some primate experts are skeptical.
“Labs do not give away monkeys,” Dr. Deborah “Missy” Williams, an adjunct professor at Florida Atlantic University who has overseen the Dania Beach monkey colony since 2014, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “They euthanize them.”
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In complaints to police throughout the country and emails to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Williams is accusing Feaste, who says he is originally from Tampa, of taking the monkey from the colony near the Fort Lauderdale airport five years ago. Yet besides videos Feaste himself filmed at the colony and Williams’ own suspicions, she doesn’t have concrete evidence to link Thabo there.
FWC officials declined to respond to questions Friday about whether Thabo is from Dania Beach or if they are investigating his origins, simply saying that they do not comment on active investigations. They did not say anything about the nature of the investigation.
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Feaste told the Sun Sentinel that Thabo did not come from Fort Lauderdale, and his critics have no evidence to prove that he did. Asked for evidence showing that the monkey is from a lab, Feaste said in an email, “there is no such paper work needed or required by any governmental agency that possessing Thabo would have fallen under. If there was, I would have it.”
In an interview, he likened Williams’ arguments to saying, “‘Ray says his monkey’s from a lab, therefore his monkey must come from Fort Lauderdale.'”
“There’s no factual basis,” he said.
Even if Thabo had come from Dania Beach, Feaste said, it wouldn’t be illegal for someone with the proper permit to take him because the vervet monkeys there are not protected. Feaste added that he has the proper permit.
“If there was an injured monkey in Fort Lauderdale I could just literally get it in my possession and then at that point it would be illegal for me to release it and not keep it,” he said.
The monkeys largely reside on private property, so taking one would likely be trespassing unless the landowner gave permission or the monkey happened to be on public land.
FWC did not respond on Tuesday to questions about how its wildlife laws apply to the Dania Beach monkeys.
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The Dania Beach monkeys were originally imported from Africa for medical research before escaping the farm that housed them in the 1940s, scientists say. They have cavorted in relative freedom among the mangroves and industrial warehouses near Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport ever since, protected by Williams and the businesses there whose employees feed them bananas and call her if something is wrong. Still, their existence in a densely populated urban area has long been fraught. Several have died from car collisions, electrocution by powerlines, and other unknown causes.
The owners and employees of the businesses that share the land with the monkeys are often protective of them.
“They’re my babies,” said Rebecca Knowles, a fleet maintenance coordinator at an environmental company where about 20 of the monkeys live. “Whenever I’m here having a bad day, I walk outside and see them playing and stuff, like little humans.”
Knowles declined to name the company she works at out of fear that it might inspire people to try to take the monkeys.
She goes through two cases of bananas every two days, and often finds the monkeys on her red car, peeping into her windows, waiting for food. The mechanics feed them apples and almonds.
Now, experts worry that social media content like Feaste’s videos could present a new existential threat to the monkeys by encouraging others to take them as pets. Exotic animal content has grown increasingly popular and lucrative for creators, a growing source of complaints to PETA, according to Michelle Sinnott, the organization’s director of captive animal law enforcement.
“No question about it, from somebody with their phone in their hand, that’s compellingly cute,” said Bob Ingersoll, a primatologist who worked with the famed “Nim Chimpsky” and has joined Williams’ efforts. “… It makes people go, ‘Gosh, let’s get a monkey, honey.'”
Regardless of Thabo’s origins, animal advocates say he belongs in the wild, not as a pet. Instead, to their chagrin, they have watched viral videos of the often diaper-clad Thabo eating fried chicken and wreaking havoc in hotel rooms, parking lots and the Walmart technology section, in social media accounts amassing over 3 million followers.
In response, Williams has complained to local police, state and federal authorities about Feaste, in what he describes as harassment and what she says is an effort to protect Thabo and warn of the dangers he poses to people and property. Her efforts gained new urgency recently when what she feared came to be: A monkey named Thabo bit a woman in North Carolina, according to police.
“I’m concerned for the welfare of the monkey, because I know he’s not being properly taken care of,” said Williams, “and they do need lots of mental enrichment, healthy appetite, those types of things. And I’m concerned that if he’s going to have developed this pattern of biting, he will be considered a public danger, which could actually result in the animal being euthanized.”
Feaste said in response that the videos he makes with Thabo are often staged for clicks, and don’t tell the real story; for example, he said, Walmart was empty the day he took Thabo there.
“No, I don’t go to KFC and get a 20-piece chicken and feed my monkey that every day,” he said. “No, we eat healthy things. Today we had a chicken salad for lunch. It’s satirical, comedic stuff.”
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An anonymous email, a sea turtle theft
Last year, Williams said she received an anonymous email from someone telling her they could not sleep at night because of what they had seen. They sent her to the Thabo and Ray TikTok account.
She scrolled through videos of Thabo on the loose in stores and appearing to damage property. Other popular videos show him behind the wheel of the van while it moves, as if he’s driving, and leaping from the walls of a hotel room in slow motion while heavy metal plays in the background, then swimming in the bathtub.
In another, Feaste traveled to the Dania Beach colony with Thabo and filmed the monkeys there.
“When I say I know a spot, bro knows a spot,” he said.
Williams began to wonder if Thabo could have come from the colony of about 40 monkeys that she wrote her dissertation on and currently oversees. In Dania Beach, the monkeys are not tracked; infant monkeys have about a 50% mortality rate, she said, so when they disappear, “you think that’s just part of the natural process.”
Knowles’ company has video surveillance and a locked gate. Since speaking with Williams, she has rolled back the footage several times, but hasn’t seen anything.
“I got really upset,” Knowles said of the TikTok videos. “… They just shouldn’t be shut into an apartment or house or something like that. We let them do their thing.”
Williams began to delve further into Feaste’s history in Florida, which includes charges of destroying an endangered sea turtle nest and stealing one of the turtles.
FWC officials had arrested him in Wesley Chapel in 2013 on charges of personal possession of wildlife after they say he took the endangered loggerhead sea turtle, according to a probable cause affidavit. He told them he’d had the turtle in his home for a month.
A month later, FWC officials arrested Feaste in Sarasota, where the turtle’s nest was located, on charges of illegally destroying, taking or selling marine turtle eggs. They had found pictures on his Facebook of the sea turtle in an aquarium on his kitchen counter, according to a probable cause affidavit, and believed Feaste had taken the sea turtle from the nest.
When officials asked him about the sea turtle in the aquarium, he replied, “No,” according to the affidavit.
He then told them he had released it back into the wild. In the Wesley Chapel case, defense attorneys filed a motion to suppress, saying that officers did not read Feaste his Miranda rights, and the judge ruled that he was incompetent to stand trial. The charge was dismissed.
In Sarasota, a judge also ruled that Feaste was incompetent to stand trial and declared the case could not proceed until he received outpatient treatment to “restore competency.”
Feaste declined to comment to the Sun Sentinel about the sea turtle allegations.
“It’s old, it’s in the past, it’s 10 years ago,” he said. “I just like animals. I’m not a person that’s trying to do bad things to animals, I just like animals. I like to be around animals.”
Over the next several months, Williams began warning Florida officials about Feaste. She also started calling local police agencies in other parts of the country about him and Thabo when she saw, based on his TikTok videos, that he might be coming to town.
In August 2023, she emailed a South Florida FWC officer about Thabo, saying she believed he was taken from the Dania Beach colony and sending him the video showing Feaste in the same area. He said he would investigate.
Two months later, she called deputies in Pulaski County, Arkansas, to warn them to look out for Feaste and the “stolen” monkey traveling in an area in Little Rock, according to a Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office report.
“Williams advised that there are videos on the Social Media Site TicTok of Kim Raymond Feaste having a Green Vervet Monkey,” the report states. “Williams stated she believes the primate was stolen from a sanctuary in Ft Lauderdale Florida approximately 4 years ago.”
Another deputy then searched for the alleged monkey.
“Upon arrival, I canvased the area looking for a silver van possibly belonging to the subject with the stolen monkey,” he wrote. “There was no silver van located in the area. There was no stolen monkey located in the area.”
Feaste described the call as “swatting” in a recent video and accused her of racism.
“This is a swatting police call she did that could have gotten me and Thabo killed,” he said.
In March of this year, Williams emailed Jessica Crawford, FWC’s chief of staff, sending her clips of Thabo in the parking lot, the woods, and at Walmart. It’s unclear where the videos were taken. She informed Crawford that she had hired a private investigator who had starting tracking Feaste’s van.
While Williams is convinced the monkey was part of the Dania Beach troop, others think differently, though they also do not believe Thabo was saved from a lab. Sinnott, the PETA director, told the Sun Sentinel that she believes that Thabo was most certainly purchased from a breeder.
The only way to fully verify Thabo’s origins would be to test his DNA, according to Ingersoll, who said he also suspects the monkey was taken from Dania Beach.
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Permit history
Despite Feaste’s past run-ins with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the agency granted him multiple wildlife permits and permit renewals beginning in 2019, records show.
In September 2019, Feaste applied for a Class 3 personal pet permit, listing his location as West Palm Beach. His application was for a squirrel monkey, not a vervet monkey.
He wrote in the application that he had not yet purchased the monkey but was considering a breeder called KC’s Ranch in North Carolina. The application did not include any information about his past violations. FWC granted the permit a month later, in October.
KC’s Ranch does not sell vervet monkeys, only squirrel monkeys, according to its owner, Chuck Bowyer. He said Feaste’s name did not “ring a bell” but had to check his records to confirm if he had ever spoken with him.
A few months later, in December, Feaste applied for a permit to possess wildlife for personal use, this time for a vervet monkey, writing that he was based in South Carolina, not Florida. FWC’s permit requirements are steep, including two letters of recommendation and 1,000 hours of experience with the same species of animal the person is applying to possess. It also asks for any previous violations or convictions.
Feaste wrote that he “got in trouble” in 2013 and 2015 for selling fish without a proper license “and taking a baby sea turtle.” He included a letter from his mother as one of his recommendation letters. When investigators told him his permit was incomplete because he had not included the 1,000 hours of relevant experience, Feaste updated his application to include experience with vervet monkeys at Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Tarpon Springs.
Feaste already had Thabo in November, before he applied for the permit, according to a North Carolina veterinarian letter included in the application. He told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that he had applied from out of state and had acquired Thabo before he applied.
“There’s no leaks in the sequence of events in regard to following all of Florida’s laws as it pertains to Thabo,” he said.
After the personal use application was approved, Feaste applied for a permit to possess wildlife for exhibition or public sale, which FWC approved, records show. That application does not list his history, but a 2021 renewal application does. An FWC official included the 2013 sea turtle theft charges and attached an investigative report from 2015 in which Feaste was suspected of illegally selling marine resources or captive wildlife on eBay. When officials searched the home Feaste shared with his mother, they didn’t find anything, the report says. FWC granted the renewal.
In September 2023, a month after Williams had emailed FWC about Feaste, the agency again approved a renewal application for him in which they had listed his past violations. That permit remains active until September.
The permit stipulates that the owner must report any injuries or escapes of the wildlife in question and that wildlife “shall be exhibited in a manner that prevents injury to the public and the wildlife.”
Social media feud
In addition to warning local, state and federal agencies about Feaste and the monkey, Williams and Ingersoll starred in a TikTok video posted on an account called “thaboandrayexposed” that criticized his treatment of Thabo and questioned the Vegas lab origin story. The account has since been deleted.
“The diet that I’ve seen that he feeds him is not nutritious in any way shape or form,” Williams says as the video shows Thabo eating fried chicken, which Feaste describes as one of the monkey’s favorite foods.
“He’s going into hotels, trashing their place with this monkey,” Ingersoll says, followed by a vase shattering after Thabo knocked it to the ground.
♬ original sound – 🙋🏽♂️🐒 Thabo and Ray
“Another hotel, another broken TV,” Feaste says in one part of the video, showing a television on the floor. In another, Thabo stares at a hole in the bathroom wall where a towel rack appears to have been. “It’s okay baby, you can destroy things,” Feaste says. “You so cute, you can destroy all the things you want.”
Feaste told the Sun Sentinel that many of the things destroyed in his videos are not actually hotel property but things he buys himself, cheaply, from thrift stores.
“That’s all staged,” he said, adding, “I’ll go to Goodwill and buy a fake cheap TV, or, a clay vase or something for him to break. Because they just go viral.”
He fired back at Williams in several of his own videos, accusing her of racism, swatting and stalking. Her attorney sent him a cease-and-desist, and he responded, saying it was his first amendment right.
Debroah Missy Williams Dr. Missy Williams
♬ original sound – 🙋🏽♂️🐒 Thabo and Ray
The bite
Then, on April 21, a woman was walking her dog with her husband in the small town of Highlands, North Carolina, when a monkey jumped on her back and bit her on her upper thigh, leaving her on the ground with a gaping wound, according to local police. His name was Thabo.
The bite, which was 2 inches deep, was only a matter of time, Williams said. She had warned officials for months that something like this would happen. A few days earlier, she had seen Feaste posting on TikTok that he was in Highlands, and she had sent the police his videos to warn them.
“We were aware that someone in town might’ve had a monkey,” Highlands Police Chief Andrea Holland told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
About 6:30 p.m. that day, the monkey had broken free from its harness and his owner was looking for it, Holland said. He approached the couple to inform them that his monkey was on the loose. They continued to walk, and a few minutes later, the monkey jumped on the woman and bit her. She later went to the hospital for treatment.
Holland would not provide the name of the owner but said that he was the same person as from the video police had been sent prior to his arrival, in which the monkey’s name was Thabo.
Feaste said he could not comment on the active investigation.
Police are investigating alongside animal control, not as a crime, but to determine if the monkey was being treated properly and its owner was permitted.
‘You’re just a different type of monkey’
Pet vervet monkeys are like ticking time bombs: By age 5, the age Thabo is now, they become too aggressive for many owners to handle, experts say, and begin to bite. Often, they act out because they are unhappy, cooped up in rooms or cages, starved of interaction with other monkeys.
Their owners sometimes remove their teeth or simply get rid of them when they become too much of a nuisance. Recently, Williams said, the Dania Beach sanctuary took in two monkeys that had once amassed over 8.5 million TikTok followers. One had its teeth removed.
“When they’re babies, they’re cool,” Ingersoll said. “When they start to become monkeys, they’re not your little baby anymore.”
Monkeys need interaction with fellow monkeys and are not meant to be without their troop, Sinnott said.
“He’s a solitary vervet monkey, so he has no interaction with any other vervets, which is detrimental,” she said of Thabo. “So what you’re seeing in those videos, is it’s glamorizing the treatment of an animal in a way that doesn’t allow him to express the things that are truly important and natural to him as a vervet monkey.”
Feaste disagreed, saying that monkeys like Thabo love interacting with humans.
“My monkey has been well taken care of,” he said. “We live in mansions and have lots of money and live a good life.”
He questioned why people have directed so much energy towards him rather than larger issues, such as monkeys being used in laboratory experiments.
“There are monkeys getting their brains open and [they’re] putting microchips inside of them in labs as we speak,” Feaste said, “but you’re worried about Thabo and Ray off the Internet.”
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Those who breed and sell monkeys also say that monkeys can thrive in human environments where they have much higher survival rates than in the wild, but have to be treated with care.
“They’re not a pet,” said Steve Gunn, who co-owns Monkey Business SWFL, a licensed monkey breeder based in Punta Gorda. “They really are, in every sense, a family member.”
Monkey Business SWFL deals only in smaller monkeys, not vervets, and Gunn says bigger monkeys present more of a challenge when it comes to biting, though his monkeys also bite. Some of his monkeys would have died as babies if he hadn’t taken them in, he said, because they couldn’t feed.
“What people fail to understand often is that primates in the wild have a very high fatality rate,” he said. “And in captivity we can keep that fatality rate very low.”
The monkeys Gunn has sold end up interacting with their owners as if they are other primates, he said. Sometimes they even flick their tongues at the kids, which is a form of flirtation.
“They could be with a monkey one day, be with a human the next day,” he said. “To them, it’s no different. You’re just a different type of monkey.”
