Monkey Haven at 15: Don Walser’s journey to the Island’s beloved animal sanctuary

Tucked away on the outskirts of Newport, Monkey Haven is one of the Isle of Wight’s most beloved animal sanctuaries; home to rescued monkeys, gibbons, owls, reptiles and more. It’s a peaceful haven with a powerful purpose: to give animals in need a forever home while inspiring visitors to care for wildlife and conservation.

This year, Monkey Haven celebrated 15 years since opening its doors. To mark the occasion, we sat down with its founder, Don Walser, whose journey from cabinet maker to animal rescuer is as inspiring as it is unexpected. From breeding barn owls in the 1970s to hand-building the sanctuary with his son, Don’s story is one of passion, perseverance and deep love for the creatures he calls family.

Read on for our full conversation with Don – including tales of his first rescued monkeys, sneaking into London Zoo as a child, the much-loved gibbon who inspired Xhabu’s Tea Room, and his hopes for Monkey Haven’s future.

Originally, I was a cabinet maker; I made furniture, I had a little workshop, I did oak dining tables, chairs, that kind of thing. But I also started rescuing birds of prey, back in the late 1970s when I was living in Northampton. At that time, barn owl numbers were dropping. Farming practices had changed and hedgerows were being ripped out to make bigger fields so we removed hunting habitat along those hedgerows. Old farm buildings and cottages were being renovated, so they were losing nesting sites too. Basically, barn owls were losing habitat everywhere.

On top of that, their main food – short-tailed voles – had insecticide in them. It wasn’t killing the owls, but it meant they were laying soft-shelled eggs, so they weren’t reproducing properly.

So I was asked to help breed and release barn owls! I’d been keeping birds for years and as a young lad I had birds too. There was a big bird park near me, I knew the guy there, went to see him, and he gave me a pair of barn owls. Overall I bred and released 56 barn owls back into the wild. Well I’d been keeping birds for years before I started that. As a young lad I had birds so I knew what I’d do about birds. So I’d had some little owls in the past. but owls are quite relatively easy to look after anyway just want to feed him once a day they’re really lazy birds yeah and an owl will fly to hunt to eat and once it’s eaten it will sit there till it’s hungry and then it will fly again birds don’t fly for pleasure no only we do that yeah just to go and do something yeah so um hours are quite relatively easy to look after yeah um you keep an eye on them you know if you think they need a vet you would look for the vet but yeah not much goes wrong with them really.

It was brilliant. I was chairman of the local cricket club at the time, and all the local farmers came in on a Saturday night. I’d already put owl boxes up around all their farms and I kept records, so they knew me. They’d say “One of your owls is on my land.” So I knew they were doing well.

But as word got around, people started showing up at my door in the middle of the night saying: “I’ve just found this in the road.” And it just went from there.

Eventually I ended up with monkeys, which wasn’t the plan but it led me to where I am today. I was building a library for a professor, through Cambridge University, and he studied primates. I knew he kept monkeys at home, although I hadn’t seen them in person. Then one day his wife rang me and said, “John’s had a heart attack. Can you come and look after the monkeys?” I said, “How often do you want me to come?” and she said, “No, I want you to take them.”

John didn’t want them ending up in the pet trade so I went home, built some enclosures, and took those six monkeys.

I couldn’t discuss it with him because he was so unwell and I didn’t really know how to properly care for them. I picked up the phone to London Zoo and asked for the head primate keeper and I continued to pester him for months, just asking questions and learning how to look after them!

At the same time, the furniture industry was changing. Everyone suddenly wanted cheap pine furniture which was mass produced and people could buy the finished product cheaper than I could even buy the timber. Meanwhile, the monkeys and the birds were taking up more and more of my time.

“So I thought: if you’re going to do this, do it properly”. I decided I wanted to start a sanctuary.

I thought, “if you’re going to do this you need it to be somewhere people will actually visit, because you need visitors to fund it”.  A holiday destination.

I knew the Isle of Wight from when I was a child, we visited here a lot. It’s a bit warmer than Northampton, which is good for monkeys.  And it was cheaper over here at the time.

I came over, looked around, and found this place in 2000; basically just a field with an old chicken hut on it.  There’s about five acres in all, with a bungalow, so there was somewhere for me to live too.  There was also a workshop, so before we fully started building the sanctuary, we set up a little carpentry business on the Island and got a good reputation.  We phased that out slowly as the sanctuary took over.

Sounds easy, right? Well it ended up taking four years to get permission from the local council.  But I persisted because I knew I was doing the right thing.

Then my son and I started building it.  Just the two of us, really. I had a block of money put aside, but when you wait four years, everything doubles in price.  So I couldn’t afford to hire builders by then.  We just did it ourselves.

We put up temporary aviaries for the birds I had brought with me, and then we worked our way around the site, building enclosures, one by one, all the way down.

We opened on Good Friday 2010, just for the afternoon.  The paint was still wet! But people actually queued to come in.  We took £600 that afternoon, charging a fiver a head. I couldn’t believe it.  It was amazing.

In 2013 we became a registered charity, The Leaf Foundation.  That stands for ‘Life Enrichment for Animal Fulfilment’.  If we make money, it’s ploughed straight back into Monkey Haven, to support animals in crisis.  It’s important for me to be a non-profit so that we can maximise the impact that we have.

The sanctuary is probably three-quarters bigger now than when we opened.  Back then, we just had a few aviaries and three primate enclosures.

We’ve expanded our enclosures, we’ve built new houses for the animals.  We’ve also taken in meerkats and we’ve got a reptile lodge.  I wasn’t into reptiles at first, but because our keepers started rescuing reptiles, we suddenly had loads! Snakes, lizards, insects, spiders, you name it.

The majority of our primates here come via AAP in the Netherlands – that’s a big primate rescue centre in Almere.  They rescue animals from all over Europe. A lot of our residents are ex-pets, or ex-laboratory, or seized animals.  A few have come from zoos, where honestly, if we hadn’t taken them, they might not be here today.

We’re proud to offer them their forever home.

Our keepers are brilliant.  We’ve got seven full-time keepers and eight staff that run the shop, tea room and do maintenance, plus a few volunteers we can call in. It’s more of a vocation to them than a job.  We had a huge storm one night, about 2am, and one of the keepers turned up in her pyjamas and a raincoat just to check the animals were okay.  She’d driven over from Newport.  I live on site, I’m right here, yet she still came in to make sure everything was alright. That’s the level of care they’ve got.

I’m not as hands-on as I used to be. I’m 80 years old now.  The mind says, “I can do that!” but the body says, “No you can’t.”  I used to be able to lift anything.

My shoulder’s been affected from years of physical work, from all the carpentry and the building.  My son still lives on site.  He does most of the building now.  We’ve also got a full-time maintenance guy – he’s been here eight years.  Between them, they keep it all going, and I come down and… “direct”!

You shouldn’t have favourites. But we all did. We lost one this year; Xhabu, our Siamang gibbon and he’d been with us for 19 years.

He came here in 2006. He was the third primate we ever had. He had disabilities: stunted growth, crossed eyes. We think when he was born, the plates in his skull overlapped and crushed part of his brain. Because of that he was pushed out of his group. Monkeys and apes are all about hierarchy. He was always last to the feeding table, always the outsider.

When he came here, for the first three weeks I hand-fed him. He wouldn’t come down to the table on his own because he wasn’t used to being allowed. So I got very attached to him.

Later in life he had a stroke and it paralysed his left side. I’d watch him and you could see he was frustrated; like he couldn’t understand why his arm and leg wouldn’t work. But he’d still climb a rope with one arm and one leg.  Incredible.

We eventually lost him because he got a bad stomach blockage. It was awful; when the keepers had to do the Keeper’s Talks to visitors afterwards, there were tears everywhere.

We actually named the tearoom after him; Xhabu’s Tea Room. He really was part of the place.

A lot of it’s experience and talking to other keepers. You can’t get everything from books.

We’ve had some really interesting individuals over the years. We had a leaf-eating monkey called Santi – a mitered leaf monkey. She was the only one of her kind in captivity outside of Indonesia. Other zoo staff would come here on their day off just to see her because they’d never seen one in real life.

She came from Howletts Wild Animal Park in Kent. Howletts were doing incredible conservation work with leaf-eating monkeys – breeding them up into proper troops, then taking them back to Indonesia and releasing them. But every now and then they’d end up with an “extra” individual that couldn’t go back. That’s how Santy came to us, along with a couple of hybrids. Leaf-eaters don’t live as long as some other primates – 18 to 20 years is a good age – compared to 40 or 50 for some monkeys.

Leaf-eating monkeys are fascinating. They’ve got four stomachs, which let them digest toxic leaves! The chemistry in their stomach neutralises the toxins. But because of that, they block very easily, and you often don’t know they’re ill until they vomit. When a leaf-eater looks sick, you’ve basically got 24 hours to act or you lose them.

Monkeys diets are complicated. People think “Monkeys = bananas,” because of cartoons with chimps holding bananas. But bananas actually aren’t suitable for all monkeys – way too much sugar. In the wild they’ll eat fruit just as it’s turning ripe, not when it’s supermarket-sweet. Our bananas are too sugary, and they can get diabetes. We’ve got a few on diabetes medication at the moment, so now most of what we feed is vegetables and greens.

During the pandemic, when we had to close, local people were incredible. We put out a donation box saying: “Monkey food.” People would do their own shopping and then buy extra veg for us and drop it off. That honestly helped keep us going.

It was important to me to have a tranquil, well maintained space. I didn’t just want cages in a muddy field. I wanted it to be a nice place to walk around in its own right; like a garden where the animals happen to live.

I’ve been to a lot of zoos where the intention is good – they rescue animals, they care – but they don’t have the money to make it somewhere peaceful for visitors as well. I always thought, “I could do this better.”

As a kid, I basically lived at London Zoo. In the summer holidays I’d go four or five times a week. We’d walk down Regent’s Canal, sneak in under the fence — well, at first. Later we just paid at the door, especially after they moved a rhinoceros into the bit we used to sneak through! So we gave up and just paid a bit for the door in the future.

Guy the Gorilla was my favourite then. He was famous. But looking back, even places like London Zoo had Victorian-style cages that just weren’t appropriate for the animals. People didn’t know better at the time.

We’re trying to refurbish one of our original enclosures – the big aviary for the gibbons  and marmosets. We built that in 2005, so it’s really at the end of its life. It’s timber, and timber only lasts so long outdoors.

As the name of our fundraiser suggests, we want to raise the roof – literally make it taller – and refurbish the whole thing. We’ve also started rebuilding some of the older aviaries from 2004. For years we’ve focused on new builds to house incoming rescues, so maintenance slipped behind. We had to get new enclosures finished because monkeys were arriving. Now we’re going back through and upgrading the originals.

In addition to this, the government’s bringing in new laws about private ownership of monkeys. In the past, only certain species needed a Dangerous Wild Animal licence. Soon all primate species will require a licence, with proper facilities and proper standards.

It’s estimated by the RSPCA that there are still over 3,000 monkeys being kept in captivity in the UK. And a lot of those situations aren’t good. We’ve rescued marmosets that were being kept alone in parrot cages. That’s completely inadequate.

Monkeys shouldn’t live alone. They’re social animals. They need grooming, interaction, a troop structure. If someone keeps just one, that monkey often starts thinking it’s human — and then when it finally gets introduced to other monkeys, it can take up to 18 months to be accepted into a group. Sometimes they never are.

We see all the troop politics here. You can have six monkeys living happily together for five or six years, and then one day, for no obvious reason, one gets cast out. Hierarchy shifts. Very often it’s the females who are dominant, by the way. No different from my marriage.

So, with the new licence system, we’re expecting more people to hand monkeys over to us. Partly because of cost – it’s expensive to house them properly and vet inspections are required before a licence is granted. Councils charge different fees – it could be £300 or more — and not everyone will be willing or able to pay that. So we may get more monkeys coming in.

That means we might need to build more enclosures. We’re honestly running out of space, but if an animal needs a home and we can take it, we will.

When we build new enclosures now, we always build an “intro cage” inside or alongside it – a separate space where a new monkey can live next to an established group. They can see, hear, smell each other safely. You can’t just “throw” a new monkey straight in. That doesn’t work.

You can’t plan too far ahead in this line of work… it depends who needs rescuing next.

As long as people keep coming through the door, we’ll keep looking after whoever needs a home. That’s basically it. It is getting harder. Costs are up – payroll, insurance – that’s an extra £30,000 a year now. You’ve got to somehow find another £30,000 just to stand still. That’s tough. But we’ll keep going as long as we can. This is their forever home.

Whether you’re an animal lover, a family looking for a fun day out, or simply in need of a smile, Monkey Haven is a must-visit. From cheeky marmosets to chatty gibbons, every resident here has a story and every visit helps support the sanctuary’s incredible work.

Hop across the Solent with Wightlink and spend a day discovering one of the Island’s most heart warming attractions. You’ll leave with a full heart and maybe a few new furry friends.