Punch the monkey isn’t the first lonely zoo animal to capture our hearts – or raise troubling questions
- Written by The Conversation
For weeks, the story of Punch the monkey has tugged at heartstrings around the world. Videos of this lonely baby monkey at Japan’s Ichikawa Zoo have triggered global outpourings of empathy, grief and outrage.
Abandoned by his mother, the young macaque has been seemingly bullied by other monkeys. His only comfort is a stuffed toy he drags around his concrete enclosure. The response online is unequivocal: “STOP BULLYING LITTLE PUNCH”.
Punch is not the first captive animal to spark such strong emotional reactions. Moo Deng, a baby pygmy hippo, drew thousands of fans to her enclosure in Thailand, and Joey, a rescued sea otter pup in Canada, became famous during COVID lockdowns thanks to his YouTube livestream.
Australia has had its own famous zoo animals, who, like Punch, evoked strong emotions – and forced visitors to reckon with what captivity means. We long to see and connect with these animals, but the only way to do so up close is to hold them against their will. Here are three historic examples.
‘Almost human’: Mollie the orangutan
From 1901 to 1923, Melbourne Zoo’s must-see attraction was an orangutan called Mollie.
People were quick to project human emotions and experiences on Mollie, just as they do for Punch. Visitors commented on her “remarkable intelligence and kindly disposition”, as well as a mischievous attitude and readiness to play tricks. As one admirer wrote, she was “practically human, except for the fact that she could not talk”.
This was understandable, given Mollie’s famously human-like behaviours were actively encouraged in early 20th-century zoos. She lit and smoked cigarettes and pipes (once accidentally setting fire to her enclosure), picked locks, donned human clothes, fastidiously made her own bed and drank whiskey.
Not everyone liked seeing themselves reflected in fellow primates – especially those behind bars. To some observers, Mollie’s human behaviours felt unsettling. One reporter felt her smoking habits made her look “more grotesquely human than ever”. Mostly, however, people did not question the ethics of keeping this “almost human” primate in a small cage.
When she died in 1923, Australia’s palpable grief was felt most acutely in Melbourne, where she was a “firm favourite”. The news of Mollie’s death “spread with lightning rapidity throughout the city”, reported The Herald, and her keeper was “besieged with inquiries of her last moments”.
The last thylacine
While they lived, thylacines rarely received this kind of love. The marsupial predators were blamed for killing sheep, and condemned as ferocious and “too stupid to tame”. But Tasmanian tigers became popular zoo exhibits, and the international thylacine trade added more pressure to a species already in decline.
The last known thylacine was an unnamed female kept at Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo. On a cold night in 1936, she quietly died. Hobart Council began looking into finding a replacement.
Footage of the last known Tasmanian tiger at Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo around 1930.But some Hobart residents protested these plans. In a letter to the editor, Edith Waterworth questioned the need to keep “a frenzied, frantic creature”:
after the frenzy has died down, it will pace up and down, its whole body expressing the devastating misery it feels.
Waterworth wrote of seeing another captive thylacine, whose “frozen despair […] would wring the heart of any person not entirely without imagination”.
For her and many others, empathising with zoo animals meant questioning the need for their captivity. But it was too late for the thylacine, which was by then either extinct in the wild or close to the brink. Beaumaris Zoo closed the following year.
Samorn the elephant
For three decades, Samorn the elephant was a beloved attraction at Adelaide Zoo. Born in Thailand, she was brought to Australia in 1956. She would be the last of a line of popular Adelaide Zoo elephants, including Miss Siam (1884–1904) and Mary Ann (1904–34).
A generation of children delighted in being hauled in a cart behind Samorn, feeding her peanuts and apples and watching her perform tricks. She was described as a very gentle and hardworking animal. When not working, she was kept in a small enclosure without any other elephants, which was common for the time.
In her old age Samorn retired to Monarto Zoological Park, not far from Adelaide, where she had more space than her small zoo enclosure. Reports of her death in 1994 combined nostalgia with sadness at how she had been treated: “At Monarto, she had some freedom and had stopped her swaying to and fro.”
Many Adelaideans remember Samorn fondly, but regret the suffering she experienced. As resident Bernadette White put it in 2021:
even as a child, I was sensitive to her great loneliness and that ridiculously small cement enclosure she lived in […] She just gave rise to a depressive, deeply sad feeling in me […] A beautiful creature who deserved better
Samorn was the last elephant to cart children or perform tricks at Adelaide Zoo.
Care in captivity
Most zoos treat their animals very differently these days. Conservation and animal welfare are important in ways unthinkable in Mollie’s time.
What remains constant is how strong our emotional responses can be to creatures who seem intelligent, lonely or sad.
In photographs of a tiny Punch crumpled over his stuffed toy, we might glimpse something almost human. But this comparison also raises difficult questions.
To love animals while participating in what keeps them captive is uncomfortable. If we recognise their capacity for distress, what responsibility does that entail?
Should we intervene in the suffering of captive animals like Punch, even if the bullying he is subject to is “natural”?
So long as we care for wild animals and confine them, these questions aren’t going away. For now, at least, we can rest easy knowing Punch is now making friends with other macaques.
