What to Do With Your Monkey at the Airport

April 7, 2010— -- Where would a monkey hide explosives? It's not a question most people would think to ask, but for those in charge of airport security the query is not as outlandish as you might think.

From time to time, Transportation Security Administration officers come across a disabled passenger traveling with a "service monkey." Like seeing eye dogs that help the blind, service monkeys assist mobility-impaired people and use their hands for functional tasks that their owners cannot perform.

Service monkeys help their owners by retrieving dropped items such as phones and remote controls from the floor, loading DVDs, pushing buttons on TVs and computers, opening bottles of water, turning pages of a book, adjusting reading glasses, repositioning an arm or a leg on a wheelchair after a muscle spasm and a wide variety of other activities.

Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled, a Boston-based charity that is the only IRS-certified charity in the country providing service monkeys, trains Capuchin monkeys, tiny mammals indigenous to South America that average about 6 to 10 pounds. The monkeys are live-in companions and can spend as much as 20 to 30 years with their owners.

Though very rare -- Helping Hands has placed just 137 service monkeys since its founding in 1979 -- they can present a unique challenge for TSA officials.

The monkeys must go through airport security checkpoints like the rest of us, but screening a monkey isn't exactly like checking your typical businessman or even a screaming infant.

The TSA does not collect data on the number of service monkeys that come through its checkpoints, but there are enough that the government agency created a section of its Web site dedicated to the animals and the special guidelines for screening them.

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"TSA Security Officers are trained not to touch, feed or play with service animals," said TSA spokesman Greg Soule. "The animals are screened with the assistance of the handler, who must remove the animal from its enclosure and keep it controlled on a leash. With the handler's assistance, the officer will conduct a thorough inspection of the animal."

The monkey also has to go through the metal detector, preferably walking through it while on a leash. The TSA agents do not touch the monkey, but leave it up to the handler to interact with it.

The inspection process may require the handler to take off the monkey's diaper as part of a visual inspection.