Mississippi mother annihilates escaped research monkey, claiming she ‘Did what any other mother would do’ to save her children

A woman in Mississippi shot and killed an escaped monkey after it showed up in her yard. Jessica Bond Ferguson said she was trying to keep her kids safe when she decided to use her gun.

According to The Hill, her teenage son woke her up around dawn because he thought he saw a monkey outside their home near Heidelberg. Bond Ferguson got her gun and cellphone and went to check. She found the monkey standing in her yard, not too far from the house.

Local people had been told the monkeys might be carrying dangerous diseases. This made Bond Ferguson worry about what could happen to her kids. “I did what any other mother would do to protect her children,” she explained to reporters. Her five kids range from 4 years old to 16 years old.

Sometimes protecting your family means making tough choices

Bond Ferguson had called the police first, and they told her to keep watching the monkey. But she started thinking about other families nearby who also had children playing outside. She worried the monkey could hurt someone if it got away.

“If it attacked somebody’s kid, and I could have stopped it, that would be a lot on me,” the 35-year-old chef said. She fired her gun at the monkey, but it just stood there. She shot again, and this time the animal moved backward and fell down.

The local sheriff’s office said they got a call about a dead monkey on someone’s property. Wildlife officials came and took the body away. The health warnings in Mississippi about the escaped primates had many residents on edge.

The monkeys got loose after a truck flipped over on the highway last week. The truck had been carrying 21 Rhesus monkeys from a research center in New Orleans. These types of monkeys are used a lot in science experiments.

Workers found 13 of the monkeys right after the crash happened. Those animals made it safely to where they were supposed to go. Searchers had to kill five other monkeys while trying to catch them. Three were still running loose before this weekend, similar to how misinformation about health topics can spread quickly and cause confusion.

Rhesus monkeys are not very big, weighing around 16 pounds when fully grown. But they can be mean and aggressive toward people. The local sheriff had warned everyone that these monkeys needed to be stopped because they could attack. The research center said the monkeys were healthy and not carrying any infections, but many people in the area remained scared.