Monkeys and Other Unsettlers

Published 02/01/2024 in Alumni Features, Scholar Travel Stipend

Written by Bri Matusovsky | 02/01/2024

This essay describes the findings from ethnographic research conducted September through December 2023 on St. Kitts. I will continue to conduct follow-up research in 2024 and beyond; this essay provides a snap-shot of my findings.

In my article “Green Monkeys and Green People,” I explained the setting in which invasive monkeys on St. Kitts are disrupting farming. The monkeys, who are themselves experiencing food insecurity in the wild, are causing food insecurity for the humans living on St. Kitts. Research on this topic is urgent. My focus is inspired by the Milken Institute’s emphasis on “on financial, physical, mental, and environmental health” as part of the path to cultivating a meaningful lives. Through my research, the environmental and non-human factors which challenge individuals’ capacity to live productive and satisfying lives can be better understood.  

As a sociocultural anthropologist, I utilize a methodology known as ethnography. In ethnography, we spend extended time in one place, and utilize methods like semi-structured interviews, surveys, participant observation. By spending months at a time in one place, we are able to move towards an in-depth understanding of the social and cultural dynamics in that space. In this way, we can start speculate towards possible solutions to pressing challenges. In this research, I have been seeking to better understand “the monkey problem” of St. Kitts, or the food insecurity caused by invasive monkeys, and the related experiences of psychological, financial, and physical stress that it can cause.

One of the key findings of my research in 2023, which I will dedicate this essay to discussing, is that monkeys are not the only culprit causing food insecurity on St. Kitts. Alongside monkeys, there are invasive mongoose and rats, who steal onto farms and eat produce. Even more harmful are wandering livestock animals, including goats, sheep, and pigs. I got insight into the situation through interviews with farmers.

On St. Kitts, many farmers, particularly those with multi-acre farms, practice keeping livestock. Practicing agriculture that includes livestock rearing has numerous beneficial impacts, such as improving the productivity of farms through waste cycling. The presence of domestic animals can be extremely beneficial to the success of a farms. However, many farmers on St. Kitts allow their livestock to roam freely, off of their farms. These unattended sheep, goats, and pigs then make their way onto others’ farmlands. Farmers estimate that one pig can decimate the plant-life growing on one acre of farmland in just one hour. These animals cause devastating crop loss.

I theorize that monkeys are being framed as the primary culprit of these multi-species multi-responsible crop losses because the monkeys are wild and a pest. To blame crop loss on the monkey problem is to be able to continually put off the fact that individual farmers, responsible for livestock and failing to attend to them, are also major culprits in the overall amount of animal-caused crop destruction happening on St. Kitts. In this way, the monkey problem of St. Kitts is not only a monkey problem, but a goat, sheep, pig, mongoose, rat, farmer, and monkey problem.

In interviews, farmers described the almost impossible process of figuring out which animals caused crop destruction. Determining which type of animal caused crop destruction is not too challenging. Monkeys leave a distinctive trail – they tend to take bites out of each growing fruit and vegetable, throwing remains left and right. Pigs tend to stay close to the ground, uprooting plants and displacing soil. Goats will simply eat all of crops that they come across, alongside other plants, grasses, and weeds. It is the process figuring out whose pigs, goats, or sheep are responsible for consuming one’s crops that is not so easy. Even if a farmer suspects that they may know, proving this is not a simple process. Legally, socially, and otherwise, holding someone responsible for the crop destruction caused by their livestock is not currently feasible on St. Kitts.

I introduce the analytic term unsettler to describe the ways in which these animals continually unsettle human attempts at controlling their environment. Unsettler is an imaginative term that I am offering to capture the ways in which animals and other non-human beings exist at odds with human attempts at settlement and settling. The presence of unsettlers is by nature continuously disruptive, and cannot be easily controlled or solved. Monkeys are an unsettling force, but they are not the only unsettlers on St. Kitts. Even “domesticated” animals like sheep, goats, and pigs, continuously defy the will of their humans.

 In this way, the very process of cultivating farmland, with its animal and plant constituents, can be understood as a continual cycle of settling and unsettling, of planting and gathering, of losing and gaining. The monkey problem then must be reframed as an unsettling problem – a continuous set of encounters with non-human animals whose needs and desires continue to disrupt our attempts at sowing the seeds of our own human desires. By better understanding the nuances of these multi-species crop destruction patterns, it then becomes possible to speculate about possible solutions. Proper attending to farm animals and livestock could help St. Kitts move away from food insecurity and towards food security, but there are reasons that careful livestock management remains a challenge.  

In interviews, farmers expressed a range of obstacles that also coalesce with the actions of these animals. The resources required to attend to animals, including sufficient land to feed livestock, and fencing to keep them away from certain areas, are not always available. Farmers work in resource-limited settings. Multiple local farmers who I spoke to expressed that they had no choice but to let their livestock roam, because they could not keep them fed otherwise. Farmers on St. Kitts generally do not own their own land, and so are hesitant to put forth the money to invest in infrastructure like fencing. Additionally, damage from storms, hurricanes, and plant growth can cause existing fencing to break. Fencing is not a one-time investment but a mitigation effort which require continued attention and repair that is not often financially feasible. Tying all of this together is the fact that almost no farmers on St. Kitts make sufficient wages through their agricultural enterprises alone. Almost every farmer I spoke to had additional sources of income, from other non-farming jobs, which they used to invest in and subsidize their farming efforts. Farming is not currently a lucrative investment on St. Kitts.

In this way, we see how efforts at settling – the government’s ownership of land, technical solutions like fences, and agricultural science which recommends the keeping of livestock on farmlands – fail to attend to non-human unsettlers like sheep, goats, pigs, monkeys, plants, and even storms and hurricanes, as they continue to disrupt, shape, and reshape the physical, financial, and social landscapes of St. Kitts. Only once we understand all of this can we move towards understanding food insecurity on St. Kitts. I hope that my anthropological findings may help elucidate the challenges these farmers are facing, and open the door for potential solutions to arise.