Iwatayama Monkey Park

There's a good reason why there are warning signs that say, “do not feed the monkeys," posted all over the walkway leading up to the Iwatayama Monkey Park. Those things have gigantic canine teeth—razors in fact that they do not hesitate to use on a daily basis.

Skylar and I thought that the macaques at Kyoto's monkey park were a little terrifying. (Personally, I’ve spent too much time as an undergraduate watching how macaques interact with one another to know that they can get ugly really fast). After climbing up the trail to the park, where some 200 Japanese macaques live in the open as one big happy extended monkey family, you can go into the safety of an enclosed human retreat that looks suspiciously like the primitive human cage in Episode 1 of "Planet of the Apes."

For 100 yen you can then offer the monkeys treats in the form of sliced apples, chestnuts, or sweet potatoes. They know the drill. When they see that you have purchased a plastic bag of goodies, they swarm around the caged windows with their hands thrust through, palms outstretched, in a kind of “Brother, can you spare a dime?” gesture. This is when the alpha male gets busy. The alpha monkey tries to hog all the handouts for himself. If other monkeys dare to stretch their hands towards you, he grabs them by the head--or any convenient wound--and twists, pulls, and bites until the lower ranking brethren run away screaming for their lives.

I tried to outwit the Alpha by surreptitiously bypassing him and slipping a sweet potato on the sly to some of the monkey mothers who were holding their babies while muttering under my breath, “sorry, I don’t feed alphas.”

Skylar was too nervous to feed any of the monkeys directly (probably because I had already traumatized him on the hike up the hill with tale after tale of “The World’s Worst Monkey on Human Attacks"). Or maybe, because ever since I made him sit through all five parts of the "Planet of the Apes," he just can't bring himself to trust our simian friends. After all, look where it got Charlton Heston.