A disturbing trend in the monkey social media boom has been the surge of popularity in abandonment videos. Videos of abandoned juveniles chasing after their owners (who are run away on foot, or ride away on motorcycles or in cars) or videos of the young monkeys cooing and calling for their owners for days have essentially become a sub-genre of monkey channel content.

The animals are usually poached when they are infants, some even with umbilical cords attached. The poaching is often violent, and frequently involves the death of the mother, which the infant witnesses. Depending on age, that trauma can cause lifelong consequences. (I'll talk about poaching specifically in a later post)

We know from Harlow's experiments in the 1950s/60s that infant monkeys undergo intense separation trauma and they form bonds of nurture and love to their mothers. We know that adult monkey mothers and caretakers will mourn the loss of their young for months, sometimes carrying the deceased body of their child for days or weeks in despair.

So we know poaching causes immeasurable trauma.

Then, the infants are 1) sold or kept as social media capital 2) sold in the exotic pet trade 3) sold to pharmaceutical research facilities 4) raised as forced labor (yes, really).

For social media, the monkeys are kept in cages until brought out for the camera where they are fed (poorly), bathed (traumatically), dressed (ridiculously) then stuffed back in the cage. Some are tortured. Because they are primates, they bond even to abusive captors.

They do not grow up in a troop and so do not understand monkey social hierarchy, communication, customs, etc. This is often fatal.

When dumped, the poor creature will often panic, cry, cling to their human, run after the car/motorcycle, or spend days searching and calling out for the only family they know.

So they endure 3 stages of trauma: poaching, exploitation and abuse, and abandonment. Many VOs profit from each stage (more on this later, too). .

This video highlights the how VOs (videographers) deliberately provoke trauma in order to capitalize on view count, which means more cash.

In case study 1, a juvenile female macaque is abandoned. Notice the camera continually zooming into her terrified face and the mic picking up her scared whimpering. The blue blanket, her security attachment, is used first to cause panic as it is taken away, then to get her to stay put (young monkeys will cling to their attachment items even in threat of harm).

The second features 3 very young pig tails. The cameras mostly focus on the 2 most traumatized. Please note at various points how many high end cameras are focused on these creatures as they struggle with their situation.

I have blurred out all identifying channel markers or pop-ups to other videos.

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