Awwww look! This is Punch when he was 6 days old. Look how tiny he was. That's his comfort plush toy that he's been so attached to 🥰
Punch was abandoned because his mum simply didn’t take to him after giving birth.
He was her first baby, born in the middle of summer, and keepers say she appeared exhausted and showed no signs of caring for him from the next day. Apparently parental abandonment happens in a small percentage of cases with monkeys, and being a first time mother may have played a part.
Because she wasn’t nursing or holding him, zookeepers had to step in and hand raise him instead.
📷 Ichikawa City Zoo in Chiba Prefecture
Meet Punch — a macaque from a Japanese zoo with a difficult story
His mother abandoned him, and the caretakers raised him by hand. Later, he was moved into an enclosure with other monkeys, but he struggled to integrate into the group.
To give him some comfort, staff gave Punch a toy to replace his mother — and now he carries it everywhere.
After a viral video, visitors began coming specifically to see him, but he still plays alone, holding his plush “mom” close to his chest.