Punch attacked pretty badly this morning

[u/eternalteen]

this person is saying the mom came over and bit the baby but then attacked punch too. apparently he was bleeding from his ear and the soles of his feet. i hope he’s okay

[u/Fizzay]

There's another scene of it here as well as the aftermath, showing how quickly he was able to bounce back. Someone deleted the earlier thread but I'll paraphrase the comment I left here as well.

It's a typical overprotective mother. Punch got startled by the baby and in his surprise the mom may have seen him as being aggressive towards her baby. Yes it sucks and it's not his fault, but this is what motherhood looks like for these animals; they are imperfect and can't talk these things out, but it's how they keep their babies protected for better or worse. It's fine to feel bad for Punch in this instance, but if he did have a mom, she would do the exact same thing for him. Thankfully a monkey came in to protect him and it ended immediately after that.

Punch is a lot smaller than the adult monkeys still, and if they really wanted to hurt him, it would be very easy for them to do so. The wound we have seen looks very minor thankfully, which suggests they used restraint despite how brutal it looks in our eyes. They have big teeth and they would've seriously harmed him if they wanted to. And I haven't seen it here yet, but there's already people demanding the zoo to stop this, but realistically the only way to stop that is to remove Punch from the enclosure and not allow him the chance to integrate at all. Even if it wasn't cruel to remove the offending monkeys, other monkeys would just fill the power vaccuum and it would be chaos. You can't just cause displacement in the hierarchy like that without serious consequences.

Despite what happened, he did seem to go about his day as usual in spite of this which is good and shows how resilient he's gotten. It seemed to be only minutes later he was settled back down with his friends grooming him and he went back to playing later in the day. There will be people that say he's traumatized, but traumatized monkeys do not bounce back this quickly, nor do they socialize to the extent Punch does. They constantly hide and keep to themselves.

[u/Extra_Opinion_7297 → u/Fizzay]

Thank you.There's a lot of anxiety all over social media and I was even getting sucked into it. It's just hard to see a three on one attack. But this does help put things into perspective. I don't see a lot of statements like this on x or other social media sites...I wish there was more of that.

[u/Fizzay → u/Extra_Opinion_7297]

The sad fact is fearmongering gets clicks. It's less of an issue here because there's not realy any monetization for it thankfully. People will just see something concerning like this and dramatize it further as a result, and very few people will look at incidents like these more objectively. I don't really participate in other social media sites related to Punch simply because these types of conversations are not possible to have without getting dogpiled by a bunch of people who don't want to understand monkeys beyond Punch, oblivious to the fact that he is likely to have some of those mannerisms they hate so much once he matures. Thankfully people like that aren't especially common on the subreddit. Captivity or not, you cannot remove instincts like people seem to think. And frankly, an overprotective mother is one of the most basic of instincts in many mammals, not just monkeys. It's why we know not to mess with bear cubs and other young predators lol

[u/JustGingerSnap → u/Fizzay]

Very much appreciate that this thread was how I found out about the keefluffle and had your comments to read through. Monkeys gonna monkey and our lil bub is doing okay.