Have you ever eaten coconut? If the coconut you buy comes from Thailand, it is likely to be produced by "monkey workers" and stained with the blood and tears of monkeys.
Recently, Thailand has revealed that monkeys are allowed to pick coconuts on trees, resulting in a large number of wild macaques being kidnapped, imprisoned and abused from childhood, and brutally trained in picking, animal protection groups have called for people to boycott Thailand's coconut industry, after 40,000 stores around the world have removed products from Thailand's main coconut milk producers.
The macaque, an Old World monkey, is the most widespread primate in the world, from Japan and China in Asia to the Indian subcontinent to North Africa and Southern Europe. Macaques are extremely intelligent animals that live in groups in matrilineal societies, and some populations have learned to live with humans and even survive well in urban environments.
However, the fate of Thai monkeys is not very good, according to the animal protection organization, they are widely used to climb tall coconut trees to pick coconuts, often stung by ants, wasps, sometimes falling from trees, or being pulled directly from trees by supervisors, resulting in falls, fractures, and even loss of life.
Even more cruelly, many of these monkey cubs are captured from the wild, sold to so-called monkey schools, where they are trained to pick coconuts through whipping, intimidation and abuse.
The cruelest thing is that monkeys are highly social social species, and when people train them and make them work, they are kept alone in cages, or tied to trees, iron frames, away from other monkeys, completely without communication between their kind, living in absolute solitude.
After these monkeys "graduate" from the monkey school, they are sold to coconut pickers, who climb high coconut trees to pick them, and they have to "work" for more than ten years until they are too old to get on the tree, they will not "retire", but they will still be chained until they die.
Others simply abandoned the monkeys in the forest and left them to fend for themselves. For monkeys who have been kept in captivity since childhood and do not have any survival skills, this is undoubtedly a dead end, and the day of freedom is the time of death, which has to be said to be a kind of irony.
Under intense pressure from two previous WSPA investigations, the Thai government and coconut milk producers claim to have improved and no longer use monkey-picked coconuts. However, the latest investigation shows that everyone in the chain is lying, and a large number of monkey-picked coconuts still enter Thailand's coconut milk production chain.
In fact, in Thailand, it is almost impossible to completely ban monkey picking coconuts. Thailand has been training monkeys to pick coconuts for 400 years, and coconut farmers in neighboring countries, including India, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, also rely on monkeys to pick coconuts.
The reason is simple, according to a 2015 report, hiring humans to pick coconuts, the average person can only pick 80 a day, and it is very dangerous, because coconut trees are 30 meters high, people must stand under the tree and poke with a long pole, and 6 to 12 coconuts can be dropped at a time, and an average of 600 people are killed by coconuts every year - and say 150 people, the reliability of these data is yet to be confirmed, but it is certainly much higher than the number of people who die from shark attacks each year.
While using monkeys to pick coconuts, male monkeys can pick 1600 a day, female monkeys can pick 600, which seems a bit incredible for monkeys weighing only a few kilograms to a dozen kilograms, because one coconut has about 1.4 kilograms.
But it is entirely possible that Arguin Schrofus, a monkey trainer in Thailand, would train monkeys on how to skillfully pick coconuts without violence. And the real situation may not be what the report says, monkeys are actually kept by the owner as pets, every few trees when picking, the owner will check their bodies to see if they have been bitten by ants, and will give them a massage to let them relax. Monkeys also have a good relationship with their owners, they don't yell or be abused, they hug their owners, just like pets.
Leslie Spencer, an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii who has studied the relationship between monkeys and humans in Thailand with his wife, also said that he has not seen monkey abuse, where monkeys resemble pets, and are often fed, drank, groomed and cared for like family members, but are chained when not working. Of course, Professor Spencer said, it cannot be said that no monkeys have been abused, but poor people struggling to survive in order to feed their families should be respected.
The most important thing is, according to Schrofus, 99% of coconuts in Thailand are picked by monkeys, can it be completely changed at once?
In other countries, such as Brazil, Colombia and Hawaii, it seems that monkeys are more economical to use hydraulic ladders and platforms mounted on tractors, or hire workers to climb trees, or simply plant dwarf coconut trees that are easy to pick.
In fact, macaques are not vegetarian, adult monkeys are hot-tempered, amazingly destructive, and have been regarded as invasive species in many places, threatening the safety of local animals and plants.
In Mauritius, for example, the long-tailed macaque has brought several rare birds to extinction;
Rhesus monkeys in Silver Spring State Park in Florida, USA, attack humans and carry viruses that may kill people, including herpes B virus;
In many places, macaques have become recognized agricultural pests, destroying crops and fruits.
If the population of macaques grows, they will not be as friendly to us as good people think, but will certainly be worse than street gangsters.
Therefore, some people also think that training monkeys to pick coconuts is no different from domesticating camels to carry goods, domesticating cattle to plow the fields, and training horses to ride, and that human cruelty to domestic animals is more than that of monkeys, and there is no need to make a fuss.
Which view do you agree with?