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]