So About The Primate Thing

>So… How did the whole monkey / ape thing start with you anyways?

Today I want to make a more personal post that isn’t a technical guide. I wanted to explain a couple things:

• How my obsession with primates started
• How it inspired me to learn as much as I could about these animals
• The horrifying conditions these animals go through daily
• What it’s done for me as a person

Where It All Began

Monkeposting

I think it was around 2018 or 2020 when I was active on BoomerBook - specifically in groups. One day in my suggested groups feed, I saw a group named “Monkeposting”. Thinking “What the hell?” I clicked on it. Immediately I was greeted with a nonstop stream of video memes surrounding chimps and monkeys. A lot of the videos you’ve likely seen, some not. I did actually save all of the good ones I saw… But I won’t share them here. That’s explained later.

Anyways, I saw the group go from around 2k people to 60k - which, if you’re not familiar with Facebook Groups, means trouble. Once you get that many people in a group, especially about chimps, the inevitable happens. Someone posts something TOO “risque” and someone gets mad and reports it. Then the whole group goes down.

A Group Gone, But A Passion Remained

Note I’m embedding these videos to prove a point which is explained in the next section

I do not endorse keeping any primates as pets and they belong in the wild with their own kind. Humanizing them like this is killing them early.

I wasn’t going to let the death of Monkeyposting be the end of the primate content that I enjoyed. So naturally I did what seemed like a good idea at the time - youtube videos of chimpanzees and monkeys. At first this was innocent and cute. I saw the classics:

Chimpanzee Reunited With It’s Caretakers:

Chimps Take A Shower:

And at first? I thought this was all cute and innocent. But once you open Pandora’s Box and learn how primates should be living, you find yourself being extremely suspect of all animal videos.

Learning About Primates Seriously

Chimpanzee Politics

After a year or two of watching chimpanzees and monkeys be “le silly”, I realized what a disservice I was doing to myself to not understand these animals. What do they like? Where are they all from? How do their social dynamics work? This is when I discovered one of the most influential books I’ve read: Chimpanzee Politics by Frans De Waal ¹. I was immediately fascinated at how chimpanzees lived in, and out of, captivity. The book is mostly about the social dynamics of a troop of chimpanzees at the Burger’s Zoo ².

This book was very important for the time for a multitude of reasons. Perhaps one day I’ll go into them as a separate book review blog post. For now the gist of what you need to know is that this was a major chimpanzee study that became well known fast. And after reading it, I wanted more.

Researching The Net

Primate Psychology

After reading a few more books on the subject, I wanted to get to the raw data surrounding primates. Which meant reading primatology studies that have been publicly published. As a word of warning, this is where things will start to get grim.

At first I read about sexual patterns & preferences of macaques, their diets, how they socialized, their heirarchies. Rates of infant abuse in wild macaques. That last one I put into it’s own sentence for a reason. It’s what started my deep dive into primate psychological issues.

It turns out we know a lot of signs that a primate has been psychologically, phsyically, and possibly even sexually abused. In fact, those signs are almost completely identical to us. The only difference is they are way more confused about the horrendous situations they find themselves in, and can’t communicate beyond screams. Monkeys in labs suffer from the experience of isolation broken up by torture, and researchers give them dog toys and peanut butter on a mirror at most. Imagine having PTSD and the doctor puts you in a cage and hands you a jar of Jiffy.

I won’t go into the specific details of the crimes against monkeys in this post because it’s too much for me to put into words. I will leave a footnote to the wikipedia article on the most infamous study into abusing macaques to learn about animal (and human) development. Known as the “Pit of Despair” ³

The Start of My Outrage

As you can imagine this pissed me off. Nobody wants to think about animals being abused in the name of progress, let alone researchers that seem to be torturing for fun. But it’s happening and it’s real.

It was around then that I became a serious advocate for the rights of primates. I was done with watching stupid videos online. I started researching what the current problems BESIDES animal research were for primates and just kept getting hit with black pills.

• Apes used in Hollywood can never be free again, and were likely abused to do their stunts. Then when they get too old, they get shipped around the country until ending up in a zoo or ideally a sanctuary.
• Keeping any great ape as a pet is insanely dangerous, and ruins the ape for life.
• Keeping monkeys as pets in general is not something that should be promoted at all.
• Monkeys in clothes usually means animal abuse

Those last 2 points are important to bridge my rage into a feeble attempt at activism.

The Beginning Of action

Baby Monkey Hate

If you’ve ever been on 4chan, specifically the /b/ or /gif/ boards (I don’t ever watch porn I swear I’m a good boy) you may have seen the more extreme side of this online phenomena. There are a devout group of users online who want to see baby monkeys be tortured and killed. They not only share these videos, but some pay to get these videos made. This appalls me to this day, and I wasn’t going to let the buck stop here.

I had to know more. This is where Kiwi Farms, of all sites, came in handy. If there’s any thread on there you should read, I implore you to read the “Million Pity” thread (VERY NSFL BUT VERY INFORMATIVE) ⁴. The kinds of people who consume and share this content run the gamut of all genders and ethnicities, which is documented well in the footnoted thread.

Baby Monkey Abuse For Youtube Money

The questions keep coming, I’m sure you’re already wonder what the fuck “Million Pity” means. The phrase “million pity” is something that the abusers native tongue translates too. I imagine it means “Such Sadness!” but Google translate fucks it up.

The “million pity” videos are just yet another subset of the baby monkey abuse world where southeast asians kidnap monkeys, dress them up like humans, and have them live like babies in their homes.

Typically these videos all follow the same couple scripts, with the people breaking the scripts doing the most heinous bullshit I’ve ever seen. I can’t even bring myself to type out most of the things I’ve seen done to these baby monkeys for ad revenue. I will describe how they live below brieftly, but this is not scratching the surface to the deviant shit people are doing to defenseless animals.

Life for a star of a baby monkey youtube series is like this: The child monkeys begins its stardom with permanent psychological damage and physically stunded growth. This is because to get the baby monkey, they have to kill it’s mother. Which means the baby never gets the proper socialization or nutrition from its mother. Almost all of these monkeys probably have PTSD in some form.

While the videos portray a life consisting of devoted parents and proper care, the monkeys don’t live (or eat) like the videos portray. Those cute baby monkeys in dresses live in a cage for 22 hours of their lives invetween the 2 hours of shooting videos. They don’t eat unless it’s being filmed, so the one time a day they can eat, they pig out til they throw up sometimes.

And even if the facade were true? If someone could have a baby monkey live with them? I can tell you

• It doesn’t want to drink baby formula it’s entire life
• It doesn’t want to wear a diaper
• It doesn’t want to be stuck inside
• It doesn’t want to be dressed up
• It most certainly doesn’t want to learn to walk upright

All these infants want, and frankly need, is their mothers in the wild.

I want to do what was done to these monkeys to the fuckers that upload these videos. But that’s not legal or feasible, so I tried to do SOMETHING at least.

My Empty War Of Reports

I started seeing this baby monkey abuse bullshit on Facebook and had to do something. Enough was enough. I started reporting every single video on each page as they showed up in my feed. I have sent hundreds (400+) reports by hand on videos of baby monkeys being abused and molested for viewer donations.

Not a single one of my reports did anything. Every single time Facebook said the video didn’t violate terms. I’m not naive, and I am pretty familiar with FB’s content detection, so I know it’s all just going through some automated system and denying it for some algorithmic reason we’ll never know.

Still it just gives the vibe that killing animals on the internet is OK if you put happy music on it and put the animal in cute clothes. It’s been going on Youtube nonstop.

The whole process left me emotionally exhausted after sending all those reports. it left me stressed, depressed, and hopeless. I realized that there wasn’t much I could do to directly help these specific animals on my screen. I’m just someone in the US watching from afar unable to say anything. I could call local authorities, which at best will slap the abusers with a paltry fine. Then they will go back to killing more monkeys.

What All This Has Done To Me

This journey I’ve had keeping up with primates has made me realize a lot about myself. I reconsidered my own life and my choices. Was I participating in the mass death and torture of animals for money? Obviously yes I was, every day that passes where I’m not a vegan. I couldn’t live with this cognitive dissonance any more so I stopped eating meat completely last year. This year I am finally becoming a full vegan because of the same reasoning. I can’t get enjoyment out of suffering, especially when it’s something as basic as food. No animal should live in a factory and die so I can eat more conveniently.

I don’t think I would be the same person today if I didn’t find this level of passion for another living creature that I’ve never felt before. Finally, I realize that all life is beautiful and all of us matter. It’s important to conserve the land that all native animals were meant to thrive in. Even if the animals are violent or nuisances. And even though I admitted defeat against the internet monkey abusers, I still try to make every day better for every animal I possibly can.

Because someone much smarter and wiser than me said it best:

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Sidenote: Where To Get Ethical Primate Content

I wanted to briefly end this on a high note. If you follow me on the fediverse, you’ve likely seen me post videos and images of chimps, orangutans, bonobos, and monkeys a lot. Even baby monkeys, sometimes in blankets.

I make sure to only ever share images from accreddited trustworthy animal sanctuaries. Most of the baby monkey pictures I share are exclusively from the Vervet Monkey Foundation ⁵, which rehabilitates and finds families for orphaned Vervet Monkeys. They are a well respected sanctuary with multiple decades of service, so I trust that they are doing the right thing for these monkeys.

Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest ⁶ is one of the more well known and established sanctuaries as well. I like to share videos of the 2 groups from here.

There are some sanctuaries I refuse to share images from due to allegations of abuse. I’m not going to name the main one that comes to mind. Which is because they are very sensitive about the topic even being brought up, I’d rather not put it in searchable text online.

The moral of this section is: never trust a photo or video at face value. If the animal isn’t in the wild, it should be in a sanctuary. Or god forbid a zoo. If you can’t confirm the content fits that criteria, then the image or video is probably unethical.

Footnotes