Painting at the Animal Rights March 2019

I did my undergraduate at the University of Amsterdam, where I studied Psychology, with a major in Social Psychology. It was fascinating to learn what drives humans in how they behave, think and feel, and I loved every bit of my study. Yet, the absence of other animals in psychological theory and practice struck me. Other animals also had experiences, brains and behaviour – why were they left out of the equation? I devoted as much coursework as I could on nonhuman animal minds and behaviour, and wrote my bachelor thesis on empathy in different primate taxa. The Honours program made me fall in love with philosophy of mind, and for a good while I was obsessed with finding a solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness. I didn’t find it, and my current thoughts on the matter (pun intended) is that we humans lack the cognitive capacity to understand how neural processes create a consciousness experience, like a cat lacks the cognitive capacity to understand algebra. But please do falsify this idea.

After obtaining my BSc, I volunteered at Stichting AAP for a year as an animal caretaker (Spain) and observation assistant (The Netherlands). Here is where I developed a love for baboons. They got ‘swag’! I then got accepted into the MSc Primate Conservation at Oxford Brookes University, which turned out to be the best time of my life. I read about primates, wrote about primates, dreamed about primates – I breathed primates.

I specialised in Asian colobines, whose gentle nature is so strikingly different from the strict hierarchical societies of the pig-tailed and long-tailed macaques, Hamadryas baboons and chimpanzees I knew from AAP. Still very little is known about the behaviour and minds of colobines. As folivorous (leaf-eating) monkeys, colobines spend most of their days foraging and digesting. Compared to frugivorous primates, there is not much drama going on, which causes them to be a bit of a forgotten primate group in behavioural research. So for my final project, I decided to study the behaviour repertoire of the Germain’s Langur (Trachypithecus germaini), carried out a conservation education program with a complimentary children’s book to help protect Cambodia’s primates.

After I graduated I wanted to put my knowledge to practice. I worked a short time for World Animal Protection and was very fortunate to receive a grant to work with the Himalayan Langur Project, to create an educational magazine and assist in research on the Himalayan gray langur (Semnopithecus ajax) in the Indian highlands. In the years that followed, I became a freelance writer and illustrator, and worked with various animal welfare and nature conservation NGO’s around the globe. In my spare time I launched Vegan Monkey, a blog to inspire people to go vegan, and founded a little vegan clothing company to help vegans inspire others to go vegan. The articles and recipes still exist on my website today – do try out the avotella.