Monkey slavery exists, and these brands are guilty of it
Think you’re being nice to animals with your coconut milk and coconut yoghurt, only to find out the opposite is true. An investigation by animal rights organisation PETA found that monkeys are taken from the jungle, chained up, trained, beaten and forced to pick a thousand coconuts a day.
PETA calls the pig-tailed macaques used for this purpose ‘coconut-picking machines’. Instead of the eighty coconuts humans can pick on average, male monkeys can pick up to a thousand coconuts a day. Big business, then.
Simply available at the supermarket
PETA visited eight farms where monkeys are forced to pick coconuts. And they don’t just produce for small, local brands. On the contrary: they also produce for Thailand’s two largest coconut milk producers, Aroy-D and Chaokoh. And yes, you can simply buy those here in the supermarket too.
Albert Heijn announced back in July that it would stop selling Aroy-D and remove it from the shelves ‘within a few weeks’, but for now their products are still available on the website. And the coconut products are still available at other supermarkets too.
Monkey schools
In addition to the farms, PETA also discovered several ‘monkey schools’, where the animals are ‘trained’ to pick fruit, cycle or play basketball to entertain tourists. “The animals in these facilities—many of which were illegally captured as babies—displayed stereotypical behaviour indicative of extreme stress,” PETA said.
“Monkeys were chained to old tyres or locked in cages barely large enough for them to move around in. One monkey shook the bars of a cage frantically in a futile attempt to escape. Another monkey, tied to a rope, desperately tried to run away from an animal trainer.” In one case, the organisation even learned that monkeys’ canine teeth are pulled out when they try to bite trainers.
Not from Thailand
It is unclear which other brands are also guilty of this monkey slavery, but the safest option is not to buy any coconut products from Thailand at all. Not only because this way you won’t contribute to this horror, but also because that is how the use of monkey labour will stop. Want to do more? You can sign PETA’s petition here.
Read also:
