My Monkey Baby on More 4

[travellingwilbury]

This has got to be the weirdest and saddest programme ever .

Americans buying baby monkeys and bringing them up as their children .

Am I really the only one who watched this freak show ?

Watched a bit, too too strange for me.

Well the people featured did seem really quite eccentric [polite] but on the other hand, it's probably better that they're parenting a monkey rather than a human child? Would definitely not want to be a child of any of them so while it's hard luck on the monkeys, might be the lesser evil.

Do you know that there are approximately 5000 privately owned primates in the UK today? A good number of them are capuchins (the monkeys shown in the Channel 4 programme). We are not aware of people doing much by the way of dressing them up in frilly dresses and putting lipstick on them as in this show but they are generally torn from their own mothers as infants and many of them live their long lives alone, without the company of other monkeys. Every single one of the rescued monkeys arrived at our sanctuary with a host of physical and/or psychological abnormalities (usually both). These problems range from diabetes to metabolic bone disease to rickets to self-mutilation to obesity to emaciation to missing fingers, toes and tails. There is some legislation in place to help protect these monkeys but it is not well known and poorly enforced. Just thought that I'd point out the UK's problem here in light of the discussion about the US monkey trade!