He is seven months old. He wanders his home in Japan, dragging a stuffed orangutan toy from Ikea behind him. He was orphaned by his mother and is bullied by his peers.
His name is Punch the monkey and the world has fallen in love.
His personal struggles with loneliness and acceptance are matched only by his fame, which has exploded in recent days — so much so that huge crowds are packing the fences around his enclosure at the Ichikawa City Zoo. Videos of Punch seeking validation from the other Japanese macaques, only to be rejected, shoved and spun in circles, have flooded social media. In seemingly every video, Punch invariably runs back to his toy plushie.
He is cute, and his love for the toy is cute, and it’s all oh-so-sad and adorable and remarkably human. In a way, we’ve all been there.
Punch was born last July in Ichikawa and promptly abandoned by his mother. In the wild, mother macaques almost never abandon their babies — Concordia University professor Sarah Turner has never seen it happen in more than 25 years studying Japanese macaques — but captivity can cause unusual behaviours, she said.
When Punch was born, his mother was already exhausted from giving birth earlier that summer and left him, the zoo said. The zookeepers began raising him by hand.
But baby macaques need a mother. In the wild, they nurse for a year or more. They cling to their mothers for security and muscle strength, according to Ichikawa zookeeper Kosuke Shikano. The keepers tried to replace Punch’s mother with rolled-up towels and various stuffed animals.
The orangutan stuck. “The stuffed animal was a surrogate mother,” Shikano told a Japanese newspaper.
And it’s not just that his behaviour with the stuffed orangutan just seems humanlike, clinging as a child would to a toy; it likely is humanlike, Turner said. In fact, in the 1950s, American psychologist Harry Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and instead gave them two artificial mothers — one made of wire, with a bottle to feed the baby, and one made of cloth, with no bottle.
The monkeys spent significantly more time with the cloth model, returning to the wire model for food only.
Seventy years later, Punch is Harlow’s experiment realized.
“He’s got emotional needs that aren’t being met, I guess,” Turner said, “and the stuffed animal is helping.”
But Punch is not just motherless; in some videos, he also appears to be friendless. He attempts to curl up with an older monkey, only to be shoved away. He is pounced on and spun around in circles. He is hit and chased, scampering away in fear.
Why? Turner’s best guess is Punch is simply a socially awkward young boy.
Japanese macaques use elaborate facial expressions, physical signs and vocalizations to communicate dominance and friendliness, Turner said. Juveniles in particular have a face they give each other when they want to play. Without a mother — and raised by humans — Punch may still be learning how to communicate.
He might think he’s asking his peers to groom him or play, “but he’s probably unintentionally coming up and shouting in their face,” Turner said.
“Hopefully they will come around,” she explained, “and he will also learn how to present himself in a way that communicates that he wants to be friendly and that he wants to cuddle and that he wants to have them groom his hair and play and all of those things.”
So Punch’s story is adorable, and sad, and deeply relatable. We have all felt, at some point, like an outsider, lonely, trying to find our place in the group. Maybe it was the first day of high school, or tryouts for the baseball team, or lunch break at a new job. Everyone knows what it feels like to be on the outside looking in.
We have all been Punch, and we all have our own orangutan stuffie we cling to.
There is hope yet for Punch. In recent days, videos show him being hugged by older monkeys. This is a sign he is beginning to integrate with the group, learning how they communicate and how to get along. That, Turner said, is his best chance for having a happy life.
In the best of ways, that’s a lesson for all of us.
