"Simian Shangri La", as it says on the plaque beside the front door, is the first sign that this is no ordinary semi-detached house.

The occupiers, Jean Smith and her partner Joe Whitaker, have turned their three-bedroom home into a menagerie – only their animals aren’t the typical pets you’d expect to be sharing a domestic home.

At the last count, their rapidly-expanding brood tipped 100. Another phone call from someone seeking a good home for an unwanted primate, bird or reptile would exceed that figure. There’s always room for more, and Jean and Joe wouldn’t want it any other way.

“Anything that comes in here never goes out. It has a home for life,” says Jean, referring to the pet cemetery she and Joe have lovingly created at the top of their garden.

Crates of fruit stacked under the car port, donated by the local Sainsburys superstore, is fodder for their animal family. Beyond those, boxes of bric-a-brac are piled up ready to be taken to the next car boot sale or tombola that the couple regularly attend to fund their brood.

Jean and Joe’s finances are already stretched funding rising energy bills to maintain the warm climate in their home – whatever the weather. “We have to keep it at 70 degrees 24/7 so the electricity is phenomenal,” says Jean.

Since retiring as a district midwife, Jean took on a part-time job with the British Red Cross, but with the increasing cost of having so many mouths to feed, she and Joe have applied for charity status to officially recognise their sanctuary and enable them to attract funding and sponsorship.

“We can rattle tins and it will open more doors to us,” says Jean.

Some of their 23 primates live outdoors in pens in their 40ft-long garden where they happily swing from tree branches, brooms and hanging balls. ‘Bug bottles’ are a contraption the couple have created to encourage primates to forage as they would in the wild.

Meerkats also occupy one of the six pens specially planned and constructed by Joe to replicate as close to a jungle existence as possible for their rare breed brood whose native homes are in South Africa and South America.

The couple, who grew up on neighbouring streets and played together as youngsters, finally got together 30 years later. Joe had accompanied his brother who was doing some joinery work in Jean’s Keighley home when she first moved there 13 years ago. “I came round for Christmas and never went home!” laughs Joe.

Fortunately, he’s an animal lover. “He knew if he took me on, he took them on,” says Jean, gazing lovingly at the characters in her sanctuary.

Joe bred birds when he was younger. The conservatory at the back of the couple’s home provides a sanctuary to various species of birds, including canaries, finches and cockatiels.

During our garden tour, one of the marmosets emerges from an upstairs bedroom window. I look up open-mouthed as it bounds along a caged track suspended in the air from the bedroom window across the garden to the outside pen.

Following Jean into the kitchen, I’m conscious of something peeping over the top of the curtain pole.

Reuben, a cotton-eared marmoset, leaps on Jean’s shoulder as soon as she enters the room. He is one of her hand-reared monkeys and clearly they share an incredible bond.

I’m writing with one eye on my notepad and another on Reuben who is scampering back and forth across Jean’s shoulders. He nuzzles her neck while she caresses his head.

Three-year-old Reuben arrived at Jean and Joe’s home in February. They took him in from a fellow monkey lover in Peterborough. Most of their animals arrive the same way.

Some have been re-homed here following zoo closures. None are imported and Jean and Joe believe the animals have a better quality of life at home with them than in their natural habitat.

The couple claim the animals’ life expectancy would be cut drastically in the wild due to loss of habitat, food shortages and the dangers posed by predators and being hunted for the pet trade.

While they don’t believe all animals should be in captivity, they say a nucleus should be allowed to encourage the continuation of the species and to enable youngsters to experience seeing rare breeds they would only otherwise see on television or in a book.

Watching Reuben and Jean, I can appreciate why she feels privileged to share her home with such wonderful creatures. His eyes are fixed on me as I walk towards the gated petition between the kitchen and dining-room, lined with pens for more monkeys.

Jean’s love of monkeys began when she was a child. “When I was seven, somebody put a monkey on my shoulder with the idea of taking a photograph,” smiles Jean. “It looked into my eyes, I looked into its eyes and something clicked. I went home and said I wanted a monkey but my mum said ‘People don’t have monkeys in houses’ so I waited 34 years before I got my first. You have to start somewhere!”

When her first monkey fell ill, the vet told Jean it was lonely and needed a mate. “Before we knew where we were we’d got 17!” laughs Jean.

At one time she had a special licence under the Dangerous Wild Animal Act to keep her primates. Recently, small monkeys were removed from the register, but Jean continues to conform to the strict guidelines governing the animals’ welfare.

Her concern is that the relaxed law may enable people to buy monkeys as pets. She advises would-be owners of the responsibility involved and prepares special diet sheets, but her aim isn’t to promote monkeys as pets. She is there to advise and she’s often the port of call when owners want to find an alternative home. Her house isn’t solely a monkey sanctuary. Sugar gliders and chipmunks have also found a home here which her two dachshunds and three cats are only too happy to share! Jean hands me a photograph of one of the monkeys curled up with her cat. Sunshine, another of Jean’s cotton-eared marmosets, is scurrying along the back of the sofa in her living-room where there are more pens lining the walls. More sugar gliders and fat-tailed dwarf lemurs are nestled next to the television. This is where Jean sleeps.

“This was my bedroom,” she says, throwing open the door to the front bedroom filled with tanks of golden-clawed toads, tortoises, chinese water dragons and bearded dragons.

The adjoining bedroom is home to Joey, a black-capped squirrel monkey Jean refers to as ‘an angel in a fur coat’, and twin cotton-eared marmosets giddily leap about the branches in the middle of the back bedroom as Jean hands out some sweet treats.

“They are family, they’re not pets and they have to be treated as family,” says Joe.

Jean adds: “Our life is devoted to them.”

And the couple don’t mind boycotting holidays to look after their brood. Jean says there’s nowhere else she’d rather be than in her garden surrounded by her extended family.

“Can you sit in your garden and look around you and see rare and beautiful creatures from South America playing?” she asks.

“The fish (the garden pond is home to 20 or so species), the unusual colours, the beautiful lovely birds we have got come to look at you and chatter. It’s better than a holiday and we have it everyday.

“They mean everything and I wouldn’t swap this.”

  • For more information e-mail: monkeyjeannjoe@hotmail.com or call (01535) 608886.