Life is harder than monkeys? The monkeys in the emoticons may be much worse than you

Wearing a small T-shirt, they can bow, cook, and even act out the "stable mental state" of modern people... There is a kind of animals in the emoticon package that look very similar to humans. They have captured many fans with their cute or "ugly and cute" appearance, and can even be on par with cats and dogs.

That is monkeys . In emojis, they are more often called "maluo" (a dialect for "monkey" in Guangdong and Guangxi).

But after pressing the send button, some people may wonder why these monkeys are wearing human clothes and performing human behaviors so obediently. Where do they come from?

In fact, these monkeys may hint at the rampant and bloody wildlife trade in Southeast Asian countries . Trade involving a variety of wild animals, such as macaques, has also appeared in the Sino-Vietnamese border area in Yunnan Province, China.

Most of the monkeys in the emojis are from Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and other countries, and are basically raised by animal rescue organizations or private individuals. The Internet celebrity monkey Bibi is an animal rescued by the Indonesian animal organization Animal's Home. You may not have heard of its name, but there are already many emojis about it on domestic social media.

Animal rescue is a good thing, but in the case of these Internet celebrity monkeys, the boundary between pets and rescued animals may be ambiguous . These monkeys, who wear clothes, perform human behaviors, are posed for photos, and are overly close to their keepers, can hardly be said to be scientifically fed. More importantly, no matter how much the keepers "love" them, primates like monkeys should never be private pets .

Illegal

In fact, it is illegal to privately own any monkeys , whether they are wild or captive-bred.

According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITEs), all primates are classified above Appendix II. In other words, no matter whether the monkey is wild or not, and whether its origin is in China, it is equivalent to a national second-level protected animal in my country. The Southeast Asian countries mentioned above are also contracting parties to CITEs. In some Southeast Asian countries (such as Indonesia where the monkey Bibi is), you can obtain relevant licenses to raise macaques, but more monkeys are raised informally and are often sold openly on the streets.

Image source: www.jakartaanimalaid.com

This may also be the reason why the animal rescue organization where Bibi works exists - the establishment of these animal rescue organizations is due to the huge informal market.

In my country, it is possible to domesticate macaques after approval, but these are the requirements of the State Forestry Administration for domesticating wild animals:

In other words, even if the breeder has money to buy the best clothes and food for the monkey, it is impossible to pass normal approval if he keeps a monkey at home and lets it live and eat with pets such as cats and dogs and humans.

It has given rise to smuggling trade, harming wild species

Why keep a pet monkey? Besides cuteness, the most important reason may be face.

**Rare cute things, like limited edition luxury goods, are a magical tool for attracting attention. **The face-saving market is a huge international market. The supply and demand relationship in the market will naturally give rise to more and more novel cute pets. There are actually many primates that are cuter and rarer than the macaques in the emoji package.

In the 1980s, a family show in Taiwan invited a baby orangutan as a guest. Its adorable appearance immediately sparked a Taiwan orangutan fever. Large numbers of wild orangutans were smuggled to Taiwan as pets, which inevitably led to a peak in orangutan abandonment a few years later. Now, there are several shelters in Taiwan that specialize in caring for those former "baby sons" and "baby daughters."

It is estimated that as many as 1,000 orangutans were transported to Taiwan during this period, which means that 4,000-9,000 orangutans died during hunting and transportation , accounting for more than 10% of the entire wild population.

Another example is the slow loris , a national first-class protected animal. This nocturnal animal has huge eyes, a round head and slow movements - it is easy to capture and easy to become a popular cute pet. They have sharp teeth, but they are usually pulled out by sellers.

Slow loris had its teeth forcibly extracted before being sold | Karmele Sanchez/IAR

When you stroll along the bar streets of tourist cities in Southeast Asia, a bunch of vendors will come up to you to sell you the cute things on their shoulders. In our country, the illegal trade of slow loris has occasionally been reported in the newspapers.

Image source: Beijing Morning Post

It is an unfortunate fact that wildlife trade is the second largest illegal trade in the world , second only to drugs and even more so than arms.

Hotbed of deadly diseases

This is the most dangerous aspect of privately raising monkeys— pathogenic microorganisms can be transmitted between humans and monkeys .

When a virus spreads across species, a previously common virus can become deadly because the new host lacks the resistance mechanisms that have evolved over a long period of time. SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes the new coronavirus, has taught people around the world a painful lesson. A study shows that 75% of the world's new viruses come from contact between humans and wild animals.

The most terrifying thing is that macaques have a virus that is extremely lethal to humans - Herpes B. This virus is unique to macaques and is transmitted through contact with body fluids. It can cause serious damage to the human nervous system at the mildest and death at the worst. If it is not treated, the mortality rate is as high as 80%. The key is that this virus has only a slight effect on macaques, and monkeys that do not show any symptoms may also carry this virus . In 1997, Elizabeth Griffin, a researcher at Emory University, was hit in the eye by macaque urine and was declared dead 48 hours later.

Elizabeth Griffin died of Herpes B | www.ergriffinresearch.org

In October this year, The Paper's undercover investigation found that on market day at the No. 3 boundary marker on the China-Vietnam border in Yunnan Province, many endangered wild animals, including macaques, were still openly sold, slaughtered, and served on diners' tables. Such illegal trade not only destroys the wildlife ecology and tramples on the law, but is also a health disaster for traffickers, diners, and the wider public.

On the contrary, common viruses in humans can also be deadly to other primates. The author once worked at the Loraya Bonobos Paradise (an orangutan orphanage) in Congo, Africa. There, if the flu is prevalent in the city, the orangutans in the park will inevitably fall ill in two or three days, and several orangutans die from the disease every year.

Therefore, keeping monkeys is a potentially fatal threat to the breeder, the family, and the monkeys themselves.

Fierce pseudo-pet

"If monkeys are raised by people since they are young, won't they learn to be good?" This may be a question in many people's minds. Please take a look at the following pictures first.

Pet Monkey Aggression | www.petmonkeyinfo.org

This may also be the first question these monkey owners have after being injured. This question comes from the confusion between **"training" and "taming"**.

**Training is an acquired process to change individual behavior. **We can change many things through acquired training, but all of this must be based on innate potential. For example, you can train Su Bingtian to run 100 meters in 10 seconds, but you can't train him to grow wings and fly.

** Domestication is the process of changing the innate nature. ** Through thousands of generations of rigorous selection, docile individuals mate with each other, and the offspring that are finally obtained will continue to remain docile because this has been written into their genes.

"But my monkey is usually very obedient?" Of course, even the most ferocious wolf can have a gentle side, and even the most obedient dog can get angry sometimes. The question is, is it easy to get angry? Who will get angry at? The domestication process changes the threshold of anger (emotion reactivity).

More than 60 years ago, Soviet geneticist Dmitri K. Belyaev launched a fox domestication experiment in Siberia. He built a fox farm in that barren land, originally trying to make a fortune by raising foxes and selling fur. But he found that wild foxes were very fierce to both humans and their own kind, and could not be kept in captivity at all. So he picked out the less fierce ones and let them mate with each other. After repeating this for dozens of generations, an unexpected thing happened. Wild foxes hid from everyone except the breeders; while those bred foxes did not flee from anyone, but took the initiative to greet them, wagging their tails and licking their faces like dogs.

Scientists later discovered that the foxes' temperaments changed because their stress systems became less sensitive, reducing the secretion of hormones related to alertness and anxiety.

This classic experiment tells us that domestication is a long biological process. Raising monkeys is like burying a wild and untamable time bomb in your home. When is this bomb most likely to explode? During adolescence .

Puberty brings changes in hormone secretion, muscle growth, and sexual maturity. At this time, the cute little monkey will gradually grow ugly - it will grow bigger, its face will grow longer, and its brow ridges will become more prominent . Moreover, its mood will become unpredictable and moody. It may still be very kind to the keeper, but once its demands are not met, it will become very irritable. A stranger coming to the house may be enough to make it crazy. Because at this time, the wildness of the macaque tells it that it is time to show its power. It wants to pursue the opposite sex, to compete for the boss, and to eliminate potential threats with its gradually growing canine teeth.

What’s even more terrifying is that macaques in the wild will regard monkeys as a threat, while monkeys that have lived with humans since childhood will regard humans as their own kind: they love humans and hate humans as well.

Adult common macaque skull, note the canine teeth | Etsy.com

This may also be the reason why we never see adolescent or adult monkeys in cute emoticons.