Monkey Business

You may have noticed that I have this “thing” for monkeys...you probably don’t know (unless you’re an old faithful reader from way back when) that this stems from being told quite early on in my career that “Any monkey can be a medical writer”. Needless to say, the Dumb Ass who uttered this provocative statement was not himself a medical writer (nor a gym manager aka that other Dumb Ass that I have been slagging off of late)....who wouldn’t know the first thing about writing a clinical report if it printed itself out (two pages a side), then yanked his trousers+pants down, and gave him the mother of all paper cuts across his naked butt.

Monkeys are indeed fascinating animals, and didn’t fall too far from us when the evolutionary tree shook all creatures great and small out of its amble boughs. Just like us shiny apes, some monkeys have to put in a hard day’s work. I recently learnt that, in southern Thailand, pigtailed macaque monkeys are trained to harvest ripe coconuts, which, after tourism, are the region’s largest economic resource. Depending on the extent of his training, a monkey can pick between 600 and 1000 coconuts a day—a human can only manage at most 100.

To learn their trade, the monkeys go to school for three to six months, and only male monkeys attend, since (apparently) females do not have the temperament to be trained. One of the most famous monkey training schools in Thailand was founded in 1993 by the late Somporn Saekow. As a young boy on a coconut farm in the Surat Thani province, Somporn was shocked by the inhumane treatment the animals were given.... monkeys were often beaten by their owners when they did not perform as expected. Following the advice of a Buddhist monk, he developed techniques to teach his fellow primates coconut harvesting through love and compassion, and began training monkeys in 1957. Somporn offered his course to owners who wanted their monkeys trained, and later opened his school to give demonstrations of monkey training to tourists. If you’re interested, you can read about the training of monkeys at Somporn’s School HERE.

Today, there are monkey training schools across Thailand, and many are open to visitors. It was on a visit at one such school that one of the more colourful characters that I’ve met through Aikido classes had an unexpectedly close encounter of the Simian kind. Tattoo Man is not the sort of bloke you would pick a fight with in a dark alley...small and wiry, he can pack a punch that comes with over 20 years of Muay Thai (amongst various other martial arts) training behind it. He’s travelled widely and found himself in some tricky situations, where a bit of self-defence know-how has come in handy. None so strange, though, as that day at the monkey school.

According to Tattoo Man, he was watching the monkeys nimbly scale the coconut palm trees, twist the coconuts with both hands until they fall to the ground and then scuttle back down to gather up their harvests, when one of the hardworking primates suddenly scampered over to him....and slapped him, hard. Taken aback, Tattoo Man first thought this was part of the ‘act’....but when the monkey then became clearly agitated and came at him again, this time with teeth barred...Tattoo Man instinctively stuck out his arm, blocking the monkey’s powerful oncoming jaw with a swift sideward push, simultaneously grappling the punch-hungry primate's arms into a lock that restrained him until the monkey trainer arrived to talk soothingly to the highly strung animal.

No one was sure what provoked the usually placid monkey to attack Tattoo Man that day. Perhaps he bore a resemblance to someone who had treated him cruelly in the past....or maybe the stress of the job (those high coconut harvest targets, the non-stop chattering of his colleagues) finally sent the poor monkey over the edge. Maybe he needs a career change, something less physical... perhaps a desk job? I heard the Original Dumb Ass is still trying to recruit medical writers....

Savage Chickens found HERE