Way back in 2020, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) - a group which, as often as not, I find a bit on the extreme side - revealed that monkeys (pig-tailed macaques) in Thailand were being forced into labor picking coconuts.
Animal lover that I am, I didn't like this one little bit.
Jeez, it's bad enough worrying about whether human laborers - including children - in many of the Asian countries that produce so much of what we eat, wear, and use are treated terribly: paid a pittance, working under unsafe conditions, living in squalor. Now we have to worry about whether monkeys are being used as slaves?
Most animals (pretty much any and all other than sponges and coral) are to some extent sentient. They feel pain, they experience emotion. But there's sentience and then there's sentience. So, no, I don't think a chicken's life is as valuable as that of a human. But as you climb up the evolutionary chain and get closer to homo sapiens, the sentience gets more sentient.
Monkeys? Okay, they're not as close as our great ape brothers and sisters - common chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans - but they're right up there. In terms of sentience, in terms of intelligence, they're head and shoulders above chickens. Which is why they're being dragooned into picking coconuts when they should be gamboling around in treetops. (Source: Pink Slip)
Based on PETA's investigatory work, Costco, Target, Wegman's, and Walmart (among others) agreed to stop stocking the monkey-picked coconut milk brand.
Despite the success of the PETA boycott, it looks like there are still monkeys out there laboring in the Thai coconut fields, rather than swinging in trees, grooming each other, hurling feces at each other, and whatever else monkeys get up to in the wild.
And now HelloFresh - providers of meal kits - "has said it will no longer sell coconut milk sourced from Thailand."
PETA maintains that the use of forced monkey labor in Thailand is widespread. The Thai government counters that "the traditional practice of using monkeys to harvest coconuts is almost nonexistent in industry."
Looks like the truth may be in the middle.
Vincent Nijman, anthropology professor and head of the Oxford Wildlife Trade Research Group at Oxford Brookes University, who has researched the welfare of coconut-harvesting macaques in Thailand, said the practice is largely confined to the southernmost part of Thailand...
It is probably the case that such monkeys are based on small farms catering to local consumption, he said, rather than farms that produce coconuts for exports.
“The total volume that potentially could be picked by macaques is small, certainly in light of the total number of coconuts that are being picked,” said Nijman. “The vast majority of coconut and coconut products do not come from farms where pig-tailed macaques are employed.” (Source: The Guardian)
Nijman has found that the monkeys who are still working aren't well treated. He also researched what kind of "employees" the pig-tailed macaques (all 3,000 that he estimates are involved) make. What he found is pretty interesting.
Not surprisingly, young macaques aren't the ideal coconut picker. They want to swing in trees, get groomed, snuggle with mom macaque, and hurl feces. (Apologies if I'm defaming macaques. I have no idea whatsoever whether they're feces-hurling primates or not.)
Mature macaques aren't ideal, either.
"...once [they], especially the males, become fully grown they become more difficult to work with, there is only a few years’ window during which you can work with the macaques,”
The males are "more difficult to work with," you say? Whouda thunk it?
Anyway, there's lots of turnover in the macaque labor ranks, which means that there's a continual need for pig-tailed macaques to be kidnapped from their lives in the wild. With a "workforce" of only 3,000, we're just talking about several hundred macaques a year. Still, the trauma and terror inflicted on these poor little guys is pretty darned awful. Of course, the trauma and terror experienced by human coconut pickers is likely very real as well. But at least they - presumably - have some agency (however minimal) and aren't chained, whipped, and caged, as the monkeys are.
Me? I'm just happy that I don't drink coconut milk to begin with, so I'm freed from having t worry about whether the coconuts were picked by a pig-tailed macaque who'd prefer to be somewhere else, doing something they want to do.
Sort of like human workers, no?
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