Sugar gliders are NOT monkeys.  It is not uncommon for people to confuse
a range of animals with primates.  There are, for instance, some parallel
evolution aspects with some members of Procyonidae (raccoons, kinkajous,
coatimundis, etc.) and some primates.  BTW, Procyonids also need very
special care and knowledgeable people to not die way too early of
disease, malnutrition, etc. and to not go insane.  Their attacks can be
just as bad and I heard (at the time when we were hoping for funding of a
parallel evolution study) of someone who worked with kinkajous who had
one go up a skirt and begin biting, resulting in the need for some tissue
amputation, I won't say of what.  (I still wanted to work with them, but
definitely while knowing what I was doing; I did work with raccoons we
already had for the study and had to rehab them, too, for their eventual
releases.  A female raccoon in heat is even more of a challenge than
raccoon adults usually are, I found.)
 
In many, perhaps now most, states it is illegal to sell primates
(monkeys, apes, and prosimians) for a range of reasons, more of them for
the animals' sake than humans', though these laws protect both.  Before
I got a nasty work-related disease (which cut short my education) my
goal was to be a primatologist and although rusty now I was the student
curator of a comparative mammalian anatomy collection (building it from a
few dozen specimens to about 5,000), prospected for fossils many summers,
helped in a study of Pithecia monkey locomotion in Suriname for part of
one Summer, and worked with a range of primates to varying degrees (at
least 6 genera of New World monkeys, esp.  spider monkeys (Ateles),
wooley monkeys (Lagotrix), and saki monkeys (Pithecia)), a touch of loris
work, a decent bit of lemur work, a small exposure to orangutans, a good
deal of work with gibbons, and one heck of load of work with chimps.
 
There is one legal way to work with primates which is open pretty well
anywhere in the general community and that is to get the right training
and special permits and then to qualify to help raise and do the early
training of selected Cebus individuals who seem like they could
potentially work out as helpers for the severely handicapped.
 
1. We share many diseases with other primates and not just mild things
but also stuff like Yellow Fever, Polio, TB, and so on.  Their zoonotic
risk (ability to cause disease in humans and visa-versa) is therefore
high; that alone has banned them in most areas.  Even intrinsic stuff can
pose a risk factor.  I had chimp E.  coli replace my own one semester and
wound up with unrelenting serious runs for a full three months because
that E.  coli population out-competes human strains but it tends to
over-populate and then crash repeatedly in humans.  I wound up with a lot
of free parasitology work done on me by people hoping to find an African
surprise.  Note that this also means that you can get them sick but very
few vets are able to work on primates and some things which we cope with
well they don't.
 
2. Most primates are highly communal and develop mental and behavioral
problems when they are not in a proper community.  This and point number
three lead to very bad attacks.  One common technique of some prehensile
monkeys such as Cebus (organ grinder monkeys) but more commonly spider
monkeys and wooly monkeys is to wrap their tails around a person's neck
and then slash the person's face with their canines.  Anyone going into
primatology has to understand that this is among the possibilities to
be expected.  Believe me when I say that unless you have access to the
monographs and other resources which you need to read on interactions
specific to a given species and unless you are wealthy you can NOT afford
the sort of communal situation or the size of compound needed by the vast
majority of primates to avoid their poor health, mental problems, and
early death.  It is not unusual to hear people say that the primates
they had years ago had full lives then to find out that they mean
2 to 5 years for an animal species which usually lives 20 to 35 years in
situations where people know what they heck they are doing (sometimes
ones with longer normal lives but those animals are less often
encountered as "pets").
 
3. Almost no humans bother to learn how to be more "monkey-like",
"ape-like" or "prosimian-like", yet these are intelligent but wild
animals who simply do NOT usually adjust well to being "human-like"
unlike our domestic companion animals.  They don't bury their own
natures.  The upshots are problems galore.  Even having knowledge doesn't
prevent some attacks.  I have a note somewhere from Jane Goodall in which
she apologizes for her handwriting but she'd just had a chimp bite off
the end of a finger; this was after she had worked with chimps for
decades.  Many people who know what they are doing lose fingers to apes
(Chimps and orangs are kind of big on that.) and often more than just the
soft ends.  Many people have faces slashed up, esp.  by New World monkeys
and some lemurs.  I didn't even work with some of the Old World monkeys
which have really nasty things in their mouths that can cause a bite to
be lethal, yet I almost lost my right hand to gangrene from an Ateles
bite halfway up a finger (Thank goodness for strong antibiotics which
controlled it without any amputations before the black streak in a bursal
sheath passed into the worrisome part of my palm closer to my wrist.),
had a chimp jump onto my head and give me a concussion, had a break, and
decades later despite fading I still have a load of scarring all over my
hands and arms.  I knew what I was doing, too.  We all wound up with
scars and such.  Worse, to be most comfortable in captivity the primates
need their dominance chain to be strong and the humans to be on top.
They fret at incredible levels if it isn't, to the point of being risks
to their own health, but they are much stronger and faster than we are
pound for pound and bite readily.  So a person not only needs to know
what she is doing and must continue to fit in, but also must figure out
creative but safe and acceptable (to the primates' society) approaches to
gain dominance.  Then they relax for a while (till the next challenge
caused by some human slip-up) and all is calm.  The challenges are to be
expected.
 
4. Rickets and other forms of malnutrition are very common among "pet"
primates.  There are very special food needs and sun exposure needs,
especially of the New World Primates.  Ditto environmental enrichment
needs, space, interaction and social needs.
 
5. Smuggling is still a large supply source for "pet" primates.  For
each primate who makes it to the pet market a MINIMUM of 20 others die.
 
First of all they are captured as infants which requires the deaths of
their mothers, troop defenders, and any female who tries to "aunt" the
bereaved infants.  Second, many don't survive the falls or capture.
Those numbers are impossible to quantify.  Third, being smuggled results
in conditions so poor that in the intercepted boxes one of every 20 is
alive, in filth, emaciated and dehydrated often clutching a dead
companion in an attempt to derive some comfort from another.  The pet
industry for primates and a number of other wild "pets" (as opposed to
domestic animals such as ferrets, cats, and dogs) is actually a part of
the cause for many of these animals being threatened or endangered.
[Posted in FML issue 4695]