wildlife – Page 14 – Pain In The Bud

When Animal Abuse Is Presented As ‘Cute’: The Brutal Existence Of Monkey Pets

Youtube is home to thousands of videos depicting the torture of baby monkeys, many of them presented as “cute” examples of pet ownership.

Look at what Youtube’s algorithm has served up for me: an “adorable” video of a baby monkey who loves to carry his equally small backpack!

Look at him. He loves it!

“That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” gushed one Youtuber.

“WHY IS THIS SO CUTE HELP ME,” another asks.

Others dub the video “so adorable,” “so cute” and call baby monkey Pika “the most adorable little baby I’ve ever seen.”

The video has five million views in four weeks. A handful of viewers might instinctively know something’s wrong while the vast majority of those people never give a second thought to what they’ve just watched.

Let me tell you what you’re looking at.

“Pika” is an infant rhesus macaque, about four weeks old by the look of him.

He is the “pet” of a woman in China, and to become her pet he was ripped out of his screaming mother’s arms as she fought tooth and nail to keep her grip on her baby. It’s at least a two-person job and the people who steal baby monkeys, either directly from the wild or from enclosures they own on breeding farms, up-armor themselves before going into the cage to protect from vicious bites and scratches.

Such is the fury of a mother whose baby is being taken from her.

(Above: An “adorable” video of an infant rhesus macaque who has been stolen from his mother and sold as a pet and has spent the first few weeks of his life being tortured to force him to walk on two feet. Right: A still from a video from a man who hunts monkeys titled “Baby Monkey Headshot”)

Pika was taken within a few hours to a few days after birth. No one wants adult monkeys so it’s imperative that the babies are swiftly “pulled” from their mothers, photographed and matched with buyers online. In the US an infant macaque will set you back about $5,000, but in China it’s considerably cheaper because the monkeys are native to Asia and certain parts of China, as well as neighboring countries and the territory of Hong Kong.

Being torn from his mother is just the first of many traumas Pika will endure in his guaranteed-to-be-miserable life.

Baby monkeys are a big thing in China, especially among the Mandarin-speaking nouveau riche of the mainland who have considerable disposable income and look for ways to signal their economic status to their peers. Expensive clothes, designer handbags, rare trinkets, you name it. If you’re a young upper class man perhaps you buy a sportscar. If you’re a young woman, you get a baby monkey, create a social media page and show everyone what a fantastic mother you’re going to be by clothing, feeding, training and disciplining the baby.

“Don’t monkeys walk on four legs?” you might be thinking. “They’re not bipedal, are they?”

No, they are not.

To walk upright, Pika has already endured the second major trauma of his young life: The human “mothers” take the little babies, tie their hands behind their backs, then tie a small rope or string around their necks. The other end is tied to an immovable object and the baby is given just enough slack that he can continue breathing if he remains upright.

Topeng Monyet training — This baby monkey has his hands bound and is just beginning his brutal topeng monyet (dancing monkey) training in Indonesia.

This technique, borrowed from the topeng monyet (literally “dancing monkey”) trainers in Jakarta, forces the young monkey’s leg muscles to develop and forces his spine to become accustomed to rigidity.

For the first session, baby Pika would have been left like that for two, maybe three hours, likely screaming for his mother the entire time if his “owner” doesn’t put a stop to it with violence.

The intervals would increase steadily until he’s left like that overnight. Each time the rope is given less slack so Pika is forced to stand rigid.

Because they must have the strength and fine motor control to hold onto their mothers’ fur in the wild, macaque infants are ambulatory almost instantly, unlike the helpless infants of their primate cousins like orangutans and, well, humans.

The rope technique allows infants like Pika to quickly become accustomed to walking upright, but they will immediately revert to walking on all fours because that’s how they naturally move and that’s what their muscular-skeletal system is designed for.

That’s why Pika has a “cute backpack.” The backpack is filled with a counterweight so Pika must walk upright or fall over, giving his “owner” what she wants: A “cute” video to share on social media.

Of course Pika could simply refuse to walk, but then he’ll go hungry. Note the reason why he’s laboring, at just a few weeks old, with a counterweight on his back, with an unnatural gait to reach the other side of the room: the demon who purchased him is holding his bottle. No walk, no bottle. Walks, plural, because undoubtedly there were several takes.

(Pika may or may not have a tail. The “owners” often amputate them — without anesthetic — because they’re impediments for preemie diapers, and cutting tail holes in the diapers increases the chances of “accidents” spreading.)

Macaques are hyper-social creatures and they’re so similar to humans socially that psychologist Harry Harlow conducted his infamous maternal deprivation studies on infant rhesus monkeys like Pika.

babyrhesusmonkey — A rhesus macaque baby of about four months old. Rhesus macaques, who are extremely social and nurse from their mothers for up to two years, were used in psychologist Harry Harlow’s infamous maternal deprivation experiments. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the wild babies like Pika will spend the first year of life clinging to mom and rarely straying more than a few feet from her. The mother-baby bond is so strong that daughters stay with their mothers for life, and sons stay until they’re five or six years old, at which time they’re booted from their home troops to avoid inbreeding.

The mothers do everything for their babies. They nurse them, groom them, protect them, soothe them when they scrape a knee and scoop them up when an older monkey is bullying them. Macaque babies nurse until up to two years old and they can frequently be seen hugging their mothers.

Through cruel experimentation Harlow found that the tactile feeling of being held in a mother’s arms is absolutely crucial to normal psychological development in primates, humans included. Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers within hours and placed them in total isolation. Some babies were given inanimate “surrogate mothers” made of wire, while the others were given surrogates made of cloth. Both groups had major developmental and psychological problems, but the babies with wire “mothers” were far worse off.

That means Pika, who has already been stolen from his mother and forced to endure physical cruelties just weeks after his birth, has also been deprived of something intangible, something so important that it will have an indelible impact on his life.

That is why when you see pet monkeys, you always see them clinging desperately to stuffed animals. The stuffed animals and blankets aren’t their “lovies” like a child would have. It’s much sadder than that. Those inanimate objects are their surrogate mothers which they turn to for comfort and a crude approximation of what it feels like to hold onto their moms.

Some “owners” don’t like that, so they place babies like Pika in barren cages. No matter how horrifically they abuse the babies, when the “owners” let them out in the morning the first thing the baby does is cling to his abuser. That is his nature.

So what happens to Pika?

There’s a timer on cuteness. Pika will be an adorable baby for about a year, which will fly by. By that time he’ll already be showing signs of extreme discontent. He’s got no mother, no friends to play with, no troop, no one to groom or to groom him. He won’t be allowed to climb and explore like he would in the wild, nor can he forage. Food is something placed before him, not something he finds and picks from trees.

Pika, hardwired by hundreds of thousands of years of genetic heritage, will know something’s missing, but he won’t know why. He’ll start to “act out,” only he won’t think of it as acting out because he does not, and cannot, understand human social etiquette, nor what it means to keep things clean by human standards.

As he acts out, he’ll be punished, often severely. He’ll become more of a problem until at about 18 months his “owner” will get rid of him. Some people will take their pet monkeys to sanctuaries, but those are few and far between in China, spots are very hard to get, and the owner will be on the hook for monthly payments for as long as Pika lives, which could be up to 25 years.

So it’s more likely that Pika will be poisoned or simply dropped off somewhere in the woods far from home where he’ll starve or be killed, because he doesn’t have the skills to survive and his kind live in troops. If he’s dropped off where there are other monkeys his chances will be even more slim, since macaques will not accept troop outsiders and can get violent if they perceive an interloper in their territory.

As for Pika’s owner, if she’s not tired of the whole business she’ll buy a new baby. Some women are one and done, but others see it as practicing for parenthood and/or they enjoy the dopamine rush of online attention and praise. I’ve seen some Chinese women go through half a dozen babies, often buying two or three at a time so they can stage spectacularly cruel contests, like dropping a single bottle into a cage and filming the babies fight over it.

What I’ve written here doesn’t even scratch the surface of the cruelty involved with the baby monkey “pet” fad, but don’t make the mistake of believing this is a thing that only happens in China, Thailand or Cambodia. Some 15,000 baby monkeys are purchased every year by Americans, who fare no better when it comes to reaching that 18-to-24-month point when formerly cute, docile babies grow into resentful, frustrated juveniles and become destructive.

While sanctuaries like Jungle Friends exist, they are overcrowded and the same challenges apply to American monkey “owners” as they do to their Chinese counterparts.

We’ll revisit this whole nasty business in a future post, but in the meantime, I ask you to question “cute” animal videos, especially where wild animals and humans are involved.

A note about Youtube and Google: Youtube is owned by Google, whose founders often bragged about their motto: “Don’t be evil.” Youtube and its content moderation teams are well aware their platform hosts tens of thousands of animal abuse videos, including innumerable videos of monkeys — often babies — being abused in horrific ways. There are entire channels, monetized and in good standing with Youtube, that cater exclusively to a depraved audience of self-described monkey haters who call infant macaques and other monkeys “tree rats” and not only provide steady advertising income to the channel operators — which can be life-changing money in countries like Vietnam and Cambodia — but send money via PayPal and Venmo to them with requests for specific kinds of torture.

Youtube has been aware of this for almost a decade at least. Going back to 2014, I was one of a group of dozens who mass reported channels to Youtube, tagging blatant and horrific animal abuse. Every report was ignored. The only thing that prompted Youtube to action was when I contacted a friend who worked for PETA at the time and got them to pressure Youtube directly to take down a handful of notorious monkey abuse channels. Youtube took action, but those channels were quickly replaced by new ones, creating a game of wack-a-mole.

To this day, and despite steady pressure and negative coverage in the press, Youtube takes little more than symbolic action on animal abuse videos, particularly those involving monkeys.

Is That A Mountain Lion Or A House Cat?

“The camera never lies,” the old saying goes, but it turns out that’s not quite true.

During my crime reporting days I wrote an unusual story about a guy who’d been picked up on armed robbery charges. The suspect’s face was visible, the security camera footage was unusually sharp, and the suspect himself had a previous armed robbery conviction from years earlier.

It looked like an open and shut case.

There was just one problem: The man had an airtight alibi. He had half a dozen people willing to go on record saying he was at a party 70 miles away when the robbery happened, as well as ATM receipts showing he’d withdrawn cash that night far from the site of the robbery. When he retained a lawyer, the attorney was able to show his cell phone records placed him at the party, and forensic videography showed the man in the armed robbery footage, despite bearing a striking resemblance to the suspect, was taller and moved differently.

In the end the police dropped their case and found the real robber, but I never forgot the story, nor my conversations with forensics experts who explained how something as simple as taking measurements at a crime scene, from the same angle and using the same cameras, could prove a case of mistaken identity. Things like gait, observing the dominant hand and other body language also factor heavily.

One forensics expert told me it’s like watching the replay in a baseball game: You can be absolutely sure a runner is out by watching footage from one angle, but footage of the same slide from another angle can clearly prove the runner’s foot made contact with the base before the fielder’s glove tagged him.

That kind of attention to detail is what helped Thomas Keller rule out the possibility that a mountain lion was roaming the fields of Lower Macungie Township in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Pennsylvania state police issued a warning to people in the area that “a large feline was seen in the fields” near a residential road.

Keller, a furbearer biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, headed down to the area earlier today and found the exact spot where a local homeowner had photographed the supposedly wild cat. Using a life-size cut-out of a puma, which he placed carefully where the cat was standing, and a camera placed at the same height and angle used in the original photograph, Keller proved the cat in the photo was much smaller than a puma.

“It’s just a house cat,” Keller said flatly after producing his own photos of the spot.

House Cat Or Mountain Lion? — The original photo, left, and Keller with his scale cut-out of a mountain lion, right. Keller says the cat in the photo is probably a large, well-fed stray.

Like the forensic videographer who helped clear a man of a robbery charge, Keller was able to disprove the immediate conclusions of people who saw the image. He says the work is important because “there’s a lot of fear and panic that can spread.”

“We will generally go out and try to talk with who reported it and get perspective on where the photo was taken,” Keller told the Lehigh Valley News. “We look at original picture and measure what we can … We look at things in the picture that we can get scale from. It might look like a mountain lion, but we need to know what those measurements are to get the scale.”

Confusion over what the camera shows is compounded by the optical effects of zoom, which can throw off the observer’s sense of scale, he told The Morning Call, a local newspaper. He said people who aren’t sure what they’re looking at should call their state game commissions, or comparable offices, to get help from experts.

As for Pennsylvania, while there have been historical reports of mountain lions, most were decades ago and the handful that panned out were cases in which the large felines escaped from private captivity or traveling circuses.

Although it’s not unheard of for pumas to migrate east, they’re no longer extant in the region and sightings of the elusive cats are almost always cases of mistaken identity when people see bobcats or large housecats.

“There’s none,” Keller said. “We get hundreds of these reports every year and we haven’t been able to substantiate one yet.”

Header image credit Cindy Lou Photos/Wikimedia Commons

Australia ‘Declares War’ On Cats, Plans To Eradicate Ferals And Strays

Australia announced the plan after a new report called cats the greatest driver of extinction in the country.

While their neighbors in New Zealand called for “woah on feeral kets” earlier this year, Australia is planning its own nationwide effort to wipe out free-roaming cats in an attempt to prevent the extinction of local wildlife.

The “war” announcement, made on Wednesday by Australia’s Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, comes on the heels of a report that calls “invasive animals” like cats the primary force behind species extinction in most of the world, including Australia. The report was released by a group of academics from 143 countries who make up the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which advises the UN and sovereign states on wildlife policy.

Plibersek singled out felines in a press conference announcing the plan.

“They played a role in Australia’s two latest extinctions … they are one of the main reasons Australia is the mammal extinction capital of the world,” she said.

In addition to targeting felines on the mainland, Plibersek said Australia’s government would attempt to completely purge Christmas and French islands of their cat populations.

I have not had the opportunity to read an advance of the report, which was just released, and it will require careful reading as well as additional research before I’d feel comfortable commenting on the claims. That said, the numbers bandied about in press accounts (which claim cats kill more than 2.6 billion animals a year in Australia) are similar to the claims we’ve heard before, so unless there’s original research here and not a rehash of the same meta-analyses frequently cited in stories about cats and their impact on biodiversity, it doesn’t change the simple fact that it’s bad policy to act without reliable data.

I’m talking about an actual effort to count the feral and stray cat population in defined areas, as the Washington, D.C. Cat Count did using trail cameras, monitors and other methods. Obviously that can’t be applied to an entire country, but it can be done in different locations and provide a baseline to work with. Without that effort, the estimates of feline impact are nothing more than guesswork by professors sitting behind desks often entire continents away from the locales in question, plugging invented numbers into formulas intended to extrapolate totals for birds, mammals, lizards and insects killed by felis catus.

While similar studies estimated the number of cats in the US at between 25 and 125 million, Australia’s federal government says there are between 1.4 and 5.6 million cats in the country. If that’s true, it means each free-roaming cat in Australia kills between 500 and 1,850+ animals a year. It’s also difficult to accept estimates of predatory impact when the corresponding estimates of total cat population are so vague.

a fluffy cat on a sidewalk — A “feeral ket.” Credit: Ferhan Akgu00fcn/Pexels

Still, as I’ve written in earlier posts, government intervention was inevitable without proactive measures. Australia’s cat lovers and caretakers would do well to voluntarily keep their pets inside, and to double their efforts to catch, spay/neuter and find homes for as many strays as they can.

If you live in Australia, you have until December to provide feedback to the federal government, and it’s probably a good idea to check with your local animal welfare groups, which are undoubtedly composing their own responses to the plan.

New Zealanders Make No Excuses For Shooting Cats, Calling Them ‘Bird-Killing Machines’

There’s not a shred of evidence that shows arbitrarily gunning down cats has any positive impact on the environment, but that hasn’t stopped vigilantes from hunting them.

There’s this bizarre and infuriating idea among people who call themselves conservationists that they can save certain animals by running around and arbitrarily gunning down other animals.

These people will shoot certain species of birds to protect other bird species, extirpate ferrets, pine martens and various other mustelids, and have had a hard-on for cats ever since a series of shockingly dishonest pieces of propaganda masquerading as studies used fabulated data to paint felines as furry demon spawn who feast on birds by the billions in countries like the US, New Zealand and Australia.

They used to be quiet about it because they realized gunning down cats isn’t exactly good PR for their cause, but now they don’t even bother.

Like John McConnell, a 67-year-old New Zealander whose hobby is going out with a rifle to shoot cats at night because he thinks that’s an effective way to protect birds.

“I shoot them,” McConnell told The Guardian. “Seriously. If it’s a cat and I know whose it is, I’ll leave it. But if it’s a stray cat – it’s a goner. Even if it’s domestic and it’s out at night, I’m getting to the point where I’d shoot those as well, because they shouldn’t be out.”

Two things to note here:

McConnell is playing vigilante cat killer, having appointed himself arbiter of which animals get to live and which ones don’t, but he doesn’t understand that stray, feral and pet cats are all the same species. This is a man who thinks the difference between a domesticated and wild animal is whether it has a home.
The article contains no statistics and nothing in the way of numbers other than a wild estimate of New Zealand’s cat population, yet it’s filled with anecdotes: people who claim they see more birds after they’ve bagged a couple of cats, but can offer no evidence. That’s not an effective or smart way to make public policy.

Between the bogus studies and the lack of any data remotely suggesting that arbitrarily shooting domesticated animals has a measurable impact on bird populations, there is nothing to support this kind of ruthless nonsense. You’d think that, if an entire country is going to war with an animal species and has vowed to take potentially millions of lives, there would be something — anything — to back up the claim that inflicting all that misery and suffering on sentient creatures would accomplish a conservation goal.

mouseplagueaustralia — Australia’s reward for culling cats: annual mouse plagues for the past three years since killing millions of cats with air-dropped sausages laced with a chemical that is poisonous only to felids.

Especially after their neighbors, the Australians, killed two million cats with poisoned sausages in a similarly misguided attempt at protecting wildlife and were rewarded for their efforts with three years (and counting) of biblical mouse plagues that destroyed thousands of homes, farms and businesses, and caused billions in damage. Mice, by the way, are a non-native species introduced by settlers from the UK.

Credit another blow to the environment from human behavior as people randomly shoot cats. I suppose blaming cats is easier than admitting we’ve behaved abominably and are the root cause of these problems.

But let’s stop for a moment and imagine if the situation were reversed. Imagine people who want to protect cats decided they’re going to start shooting dogs, foxes, coyotes, owls, eagles and other large birds of prey.

Suppose someone decided that John McConnell’s dog shouldn’t be out for walks and shot it in an act of conservationist vigilantism.

Would anyone tolerate that? Wouldn’t they be labeled lunatics and condemned? What makes the cat culling any different, aside from “justification” in the form of a handful of widely-condemned, heavily-criticized studies that violate just about every elementary rule of scientific research?

Here’s comedian Bill Burr’s take on the absurdity of human efforts to manage wildlife population by shooting animals. Burr, whose everyman facade and humor often mask salient points, also takes the rest of us to task by pointing out it’s humanity, not the behavior of animals, that has the biggest impact on the planet and its wildlife, yet no one’s suggesting we cull our own population.

“I think it’s weird that human beings are trying to control the populations of animals. You know? Like any time the deer population gets out of control, some dude will get on TV like [puts on a redneck accent] ‘Okay, the deer population is up to about 17, 1,800, realistically we need to get that number down to about five or six, alright? So starting tomorrow, if you got a gun, f—ing shoot them in the face!’ I’m just sitting at home like, ‘What are the deer doing that’s so bad for the environment?’ [Slips into a redneck accent again] ‘They eat all the f—in’ grass! They comin’ up to trees, just nibblin’! Just nibblin’!’ Dude, the deer didn’t put a hole in the ozone layer, alright? That’s not a bunch of dogs clogging up the freeway. It’s us, alright?”

Then he lays into people who breed like rabbits, and this is a personal pet peeve of mine whenever I hear someone like Alec Baldwin, a man who has eight children, four massive homes, a fleet of SUVs and an army of nannies, holding court on environmental responsibility and global warming. Baldwin has 12 to 16 people living under his roof at any time, with palatial homes that consume more energy each than entire European villages, yet that doesn’t stop him from adopting a patrician tone and lecturing the “peasants” (his word) on their environmental responsibilities.

A word of caution: while I think Burr is hilarious, this clip is also peppered with obscenities, as his most of his material. If that sort of thing bothers you, skip the clip. If not, well, he’s got a point:

North Carolina Zoo Welcomes 3 Newborn Sand Cat Kittens

Sand cats are among the smallest felines in the world and live in harsh environments.

It’s baby season at the North Carolina Zoo.

The 500-acre facility in Asheboro announced the birth of three healthy sand cat kittens. The species, felis margarita, is among the tiniest of all felids and is elusive in the wild, able to survive in desert biomes far from water in the African Sahara, as well as the Middle East and parts of Asia.

The kittens were born to first-time mom Sahara, 3, and Cosmo, 9, and remain unnamed for now. The zoo said it will allow the public to vote on their names, with details to be revealed in the near future.

The fortuitous birth of the tiny felines follows the arrival of a giraffe calf and a chimpanzee baby, both male, all within a two-week period in mid-May, the zoo said.

“The mom and triplets are doing well,” zoo staff wrote in an announcement. “The trio are beginning to explore their surroundings in the Desert Habitat. Lucky guests may be able to catch a glimpse of them in the coming days.”

Although sand cats aren’t listed as endangered, scientists don’t have a good handle on their numbers and caution that they may be less populous than estimated. The parents were arranged as a breeding pair for maximum genetic diversity through the Sand Cat Species Survival Plan and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the zoo said.