THEY'RE MY KIDS!

This West Coast woman treats her monkeys as iftheyre humans and animal activists are not happy about it

-  PIETER VAN ZYL

THEY'RE her babies and she loves dressing them up.

Looking at the two exotic monkeys you can see a great deal of thought has gone into what they're wearing - Misha is dressed in a Spider-Man outfit while Stevie is clad in Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas.

The creatures seem happy enough, chattering and chirping excitedly and jumping on us when we visit them and their adoptive mom Yolanda van der Berg at her home in the West Coast town of Vredenburg.

Stevie sticks out his tongue. Misha nibbles on my index finger until it bleeds.

While Yolanda insists the clothes her capuchin monkeys wear are cute and the animals don't mind them, other people disagree. They think it's cruel to dress monkeys up as though they are humans and one animal activist was so horrified she decided she had a duty to "rescue" Stevie and Misha.

When she found out the monkeys were being held at a shelter in the Garden Route while Yolanda waited to be issued with a permit to keep them, she saw a golden opportunity.

Yolanda (43) tells us she was out of her mind with worry when she found out Stevie and Misha had been removed from the shelter and taken to Pretoria.

"I couldn't eat for a month," she says. "It felt like I was having a nervous breakdown."

She opened a case of theft and police confiscated the monkeys. Yolanda and her husband, Bennie van der Berg (52), drove through the night to fetch them in Gauteng and bring them home.

The monkeys are happy here, Yolanda says.

They have a garden in front of the family home where they love to play and Phillip, Yolanda and Bennie's eight-yearold son, enjoys spending time with them.

"They climb in the tree," Phillip adds, pointing to an old wild fig.

"I like the monkeys.

They play nicely and nibble." Their neighbours are used to the monkey business that goes on in their garden, Yolanda says.