Is It Legal to Own a Monkey? Primate Laws by State

Almost nobody searching this question wants a chimpanzee. They want a capuchin, a marmoset, a squirrel monkey or a ring-tailed lemur: the small primates the trade sells. The statutes mostly do not care which. Forty of the fifty-two jurisdictions on the map restrict the order Primates by name, and a law that says "all nonhuman primates" gives a four-ounce pygmy marmoset the same answer it gives a gorilla. That is why these four animals agree in forty-six jurisdictions, and why the six places they disagree are where the reading gets hard: Ohio, New Jersey, Idaho, Missouri, South Carolina and West Virginia split the lemur from the monkeys for reasons that have nothing to do with how dangerous any of them is.

Two federal rules sit underneath every state answer. Since 1975 the Centers for Disease Control has allowed live nonhuman primates into the United States only through registered importers and only for a permitted purpose, which 42 CFR 71.53 defines as "the use of NHPs for scientific, educational, or exhibition purposes", and (d)(3) closes the loop: "A person may not accept, maintain, sell, resell, or otherwise distribute imported NHPs (including their offspring) for use as pets, as a hobby, or as an avocation with occasional display to the general public." The pet trade was shut at the border fifty years ago, and every pet primate in the country descends from stock already here. The ring-tailed lemur carries a second layer: Lemur catta is on CITES Appendix I, which bars commercial international trade in the species, and the whole family Lemuridae is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act at 50 CFR 17.11. Neither rule says anything about keeping one at home. CITES is a border rule and not an ownership rule; what the federal endangered list does inside a state depends on whether that state adopted it, and three did.

The Shape of It

Every jurisdiction that restricts at least one of the four is here. The twelve that restrict none of them follow below.

The Order Does the Work

The commonest sentence on this map is some version of "all nonhuman primates", and it is worth seeing how little it leaves open. Pennsylvania's 58 Pa. Code § 137.1(a)(7) prohibits "The order Primates. All families of nonhuman primates." Wyoming's Chapter 10 says a permit "shall not be issued" for "All members of the order nonhuman primates." California restricts "Order Primates-Monkeys, Apes: All species" and carves out only humans. None of those sentences needed to name a species, which is why a capuchin and a lemur get the same answer in them. The differences on this part of the map are about windows rather than animals: Washington's closed on 22 July 2007, Illinois's on 1 April 2011, Minnesota's on 1 January 2005, Iowa's on 1 July 2007, and none of them lets the registered animal be replaced or bred.

Three states wrote the same rule and then wrote a disability exception into it, and all three exceptions are about the capuchin. New York's ECL § 11-0512(2)(j) covers a New World monkey trained by a 501(c) organization for a person paralyzed from the neck down, and Maryland's Criminal Law § 10-621(a)(3) covers an animal trained for a person whose disability severely limits mobility. Georgia names the genus, at O.C.G.A. § 27-5-4(b)(2):

The department shall issue a wild animal permit only for an animal in the genus Cebus (capuchin monkeys) to any person who establishes to the satisfaction of the department that: (A) Such person has a permanent disability or disease which interferes with the person's ability to perform one or more routine daily living activities;

The permit is free, the animal must come from a nonprofit with ten years of placing assistance animals, and it must be the only wild animal that person holds. That is the entire private primate route in Georgia, and it is not a pet route: the rule puts "Order Primates (monkeys, apes, etc) - All species" in the license tier, § 27-5-4(b)(1) issues licenses only to persons "engaged in the wholesale or retail wild animal business or persons exhibiting wild animals to the public", and the DNR's guide to legal pets lists all primates among exotics that may not be held, with lemurs on their own line.

Where Texas and Florida Draw the Line

Texas is the answer to the most-typed version of this question, and it is a clean one. Health and Safety Code § 822.101(4) is a closed list of twenty clauses, and the primates on it are "(P) a baboon; (Q) a chimpanzee; (R) an orangutan; (S) a gorilla". A capuchin, marmoset, squirrel monkey or lemur is on none of them and is not a hybrid of anything that is, so § 822.103's certificate of registration and § 822.107's $100,000 of liability insurance never attach. The same list puts the serval at clause (J), which is why the serval legal guide reads Texas as a permit state while a monkey reads it as a free one: the statute was written about cats and bears, with the four big primates added, and it stops there. Texas cities and counties regulate primates far more often than the state does, so the ordinance is the thing to read.

Tennessee, Mississippi and South Carolina draw the same line in different words. Tenn. Code Ann. § 70-4-403(3)(M) sends "Primates not otherwise listed" to Class III, which needs no wildlife permit, after Class I takes the apes, gibbons, mandrills, drills and baboons. Mississippi's inherently dangerous list takes the family Pongidae, the macaques, the baboons and the gelada, and nothing smaller. South Carolina's 2018 ban reaches primates only through "Family Hominidae ... all great apes".

Florida regulates all four and charges nothing for it. The captive wildlife rule writes its primate classes genus by genus: Class I takes the great apes, gibbons, baboons and drills; Class II takes howlers, uakaris, mangabeys, guenons, patas and vervet monkeys, sakis, colobus, indris, macaques and langurs. The four animals here are on neither list, and 68A-6.002(1)(c) catches them with its closing clause:

Class III: All other wildlife not listed herein, except those for which a permit is not required pursuant to Rule 68A-6.003, F.A.C.

A Class III animal needs a Permit to Possess Class III Wildlife for Personal Use, which the Commission issues free, and primates have their own caging standard at 68A-6.0121. Florida is the only state on the map that answers "yes, with a permit" for all four and means a pet permit by it.

Ohio Wrote Two Sections That Do Not Agree

Ohio is the one state where the three monkeys and the lemur get different buckets from the same chapter, and where the monkeys' bucket is gray. R.C. 935.01(C)(19) defines a dangerous wild animal to include "Nonhuman primates other than lemurs and the nonhuman primates specified in division (C)(20)", and § 935.02(A) says that "No person shall possess a dangerous wild animal on or after January 1, 2014" unless it was registered in 2012. Read alone, that bars a capuchin. But the same bill enacted R.C. 935.041:

A person that possesses any of the following animals shall register the animal in the same manner as provided in section 935.04 of the Revised Code: (A) Pygmy, white-tufted-ear, silvery, and black-pencilled marmosets; (B) Squirrel monkeys; (C) Brown, white-faced, weeping, and white-fronted capuchins; (D) Lemurs.

A registration section for animals the chapter elsewhere bars outright only makes sense if those animals are not dangerous wild animals. The two sections cannot both be read at full strength, and the map records the capuchin, the common marmoset (the statute's "white-tufted-ear") and the squirrel monkey as unclear rather than guess. The lemur has no such problem: it is written out of (C)(19) in terms, so the possession bar never touches it, and § 935.041 asks only for registration with a microchip implanted at the time. The serval, by contrast, is a dangerous wild animal under § 935.01(C)(7)(e) and has been barred since 2014 for anyone who did not register one in 2012, which is the closed window the three monkeys would face if (C)(19) governs.

The Lemur Is the Odd One Out

Five states answer the lemur differently from the monkeys, and in four of them the federal endangered list is the reason. Its CITES Appendix I listing is not among the reasons: CITES governs the border and not the home, which the federal laws guide explains.

Missouri's Wildlife Code gives nonnative mammals a free pass at 3 CSR 10-9.110(2), "Except for federally-designated endangered species and species listed in 3 CSR 10-4.117 and 3 CSR 10-9.240". A capuchin, marmoset or squirrel monkey needs no Wildlife Code permit, only the county registration that RSMo § 578.023 requires of anyone who keeps a "nonhuman primate". A ring-tailed lemur falls inside the carve-out, because 50 CFR 17.11 lists the whole family Lemuridae as endangered, and that leaves the general prohibition in 3 CSR 10-4.110(1), which bars possessing wildlife "except as specifically permitted by these rules". No permit read is a pet route for an exotic endangered mammal.

South Carolina does the same by statute. The 2018 ban reaches only the great apes, so the three monkeys are legal there, but S.C. Code § 50-15-30(C)(3) separately makes it unlawful to possess any species on "the United States' List of Endangered Foreign Fish and Wildlife (Part 17 of Title 50, Code of Federal Regulations, Appendix A, 50 C.F.R. Section 17.11), as such list may be modified hereafter", and § 50-15-40(D) lets the department permit possession only for scientific, zoological, educational, propagation or other special purposes.

New Jersey closes the lemur the same way. N.J.A.C. 7:25-4.10(a) says that "no permit shall be issued for the possession of any species designated as endangered by the U.S. Department of the Interior", and the exception at 4.14 requires a federal endangered species permit, a sponsoring organization and a written proposal for scientific research. The capuchin and squirrel monkey are barred by a different sentence: "Cebidae--New World Monkeys" heads the potentially dangerous species table, and 4.9(a)3 says a potentially dangerous species "shall not be kept as a pet, for hobby purposes". The marmoset is the one New Jersey cannot settle, because its family was Callitrichidae when that table was written and is now generally placed inside Cebidae; read the first way it takes the individual hobby permit, read the second it has no pet route.

Idaho sends the lemur to the zoo and the monkeys to the permit desk. IDAPA 02.04.27.407 says "All non-human primates must be possessed on a facility that is AZA accredited" and then exempts four entries, the capuchin, the marmoset, the spider monkey and the squirrel monkey. The lemur is not among them. The three exempt monkeys still need a Fish and Game captive possession license, because the conventional pets list has no primate on it.

West Virginia runs the other direction. W. Va. C.S.R. § 74-1-3.1.o puts "Nonhuman primates" on the Dangerous Wild Animal list and then excludes, first of all, "3.1.o.1. Lemurs". A ring-tailed lemur is therefore not a dangerous wild animal, and because it is not native it is not a "wild animal" under § 20-1-2 either. The capuchin, marmoset and squirrel monkey are on the list and barred, with the only permit going to someone who lawfully had the animal before the board's rules took effect in 2022.

Permits That Are Real, and Permits That Are Not

Six jurisdictions will issue something to a private keeper, and the pieces of paper have little in common. Arkansas names all four animals on its Addendum R1.02 permit list, so a monkey may be kept if it came from a Commission-permitted breeder or dealer, and Ark. Code Ann. § 20-19-605 then requires the owner to register it with the county sheriff within 30 days; the state statute bars only apes, baboons and macaques. South Dakota puts the whole order on its possession permit list at ten dollars an animal. North Dakota makes primates category 3 nontraditional livestock, and the fifteen-dollar license must be in hand with the premises inspected before the animal is acquired. Delaware's regulation 903 writes the Individual Permit for "an exotic ... kept as a pet", per animal for three years. Florida's Class III permit is the fifth, and Vermont's discretionary permit, below, the sixth.

Massachusetts looks like a permit state and is not. It is a closed-list state where an unlisted mammal needs a license, and MassWildlife issues permits for non-exempt wildlife "only for certain scientific, educational, commercial, or other specific reasons" and adds "You will not be issued a permit for keeping a wild animal as a pet". Vermont has the same closed list and a different permit: Regulation 881 lets the Commissioner issue one outside science and education on a finding that the animal "does not conflict with the purpose of this regulation", a discretionary call with no published standard. Rhode Island's § 3.7(B) restricts the order to researchers, short-term USDA exhibitors and AZA facilities, New Hampshire's Table 800.2 marks all four animals for permittee category 5, which is exhibitors, and Arizona's R12-4-406(F)(8) makes "All nonhuman primates" restricted live wildlife with no exemption written for a pet.

The Twelve With No Rule

Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, Nevada, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kansas, Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma restrict none of the four at state level, and they get there by four different roads.

The first is a primate line drawn at the big species: Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi and, for the monkeys, South Carolina. The second is a nonnative-animal rule that never names a primate: Virginia's exotic permit table, Alabama's restricted list and Indiana's three class lists each name carnivores, reptiles and rodents and nothing with hands, and Kansas lets exotic wildlife "be possessed without limit in time and number" if it was lawfully obtained where it came from. The third is an exemption written in the animal's favor: Nevada's NAC 503.140(1)(m) lists "Monkeys and other primates" among animals that may be possessed without any permit at all, and Oklahoma's exemption list ends on "(37) Primates." The fourth is a general exemption the animal falls into. Wisconsin frees every nonnative wild animal that is not harmful or an endangered species, and because § 169.01(9) confines "endangered or threatened species" to animals indigenous to the United States or Canada, the lemur's federal listing does nothing there. Michigan's Large Carnivore Act names cats and bears, so nothing read reaches a monkey, and North Carolina hands the question to counties under § 153A-131, several of which have answered it.

In every one of the twelve, local ordinances were not checked. Nevada's own rule preserves county and city ordinances in terms, and primates appear on municipal exotic animal lists far more often than hedgehogs or snakes do. A state with no primate rule is a state where the city is the whole answer.

The Takeaway

The question has a federal answer, a state answer and a local one, and only the middle one varies. Federally, no pet primate may be imported. At state level, forty jurisdictions restrict the order Primates and most of them do it with a sentence that never needed to know the species. In Florida, Arkansas, South Dakota, North Dakota and Delaware the permit is real and personal; in Vermont it is personal and discretionary; in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Arizona it exists for institutions. In Ohio the capuchin, marmoset and squirrel monkey sit between two sections that disagree, and the lemur does not.

The lemur is the animal to read twice. Missouri, South Carolina and New Jersey bar it through the federal endangered list while clearing or registering the monkeys beside it, Idaho confines it to accredited zoos, and West Virginia and Ohio turn around and treat it as the gentlest primate on the list. The map rows for the marmoset and the ring-tailed lemur, like the two monkeys' above, shade every state and quote the sentence each answer comes from, and in the twelve states that have no sentence, the thing to read next is the county code.

Sources & Further Reading