Punch
Last year, I bought two plushies (also known as stuffed animals), one black and one brown, depicting juvenile orangutans. At that time, I was teaching an undergraduate class on biological anthropology and the famous primatologist, Jane Goodall, perhaps the most well-known expert on primates, had just passed away, so I thought the two plushies would be good teaching aids to explain Goodall’s work on evolution, primatology, and our family tree.
Unexpectedly, I had to return to Ikea last week planning to buy another pair of the orangutan plushies, only to learn that Ikea had run out of stock. New stock had been ordered, but no one knew when it would arrive.
What happened? In July last year, the Ichikawa Zoo, near Tokyo, welcomed a new infant macaque, which was eventually named Punch. A quick zoology lesson: we tend to call all primates “monkeys” (or, in Filipino, unggoy), but there are actually many different types. The two broadest categories of primates are apes (for example: orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and yes, fellow humans) and monkeys (for example: baboons, marmosets, and macaques, the common unggoy or matsing). A quick way of broadly differentiating them: apes don’t have tails, while monkeys do.
Back to Punch. Unfortunately, Punch was rejected by the mother, perhaps because she was still too young for maternity, perhaps, too, because it was a hot summer. People love to go to zoos, but they’re not the best places for the animals—really concrete, overcrowded jungles.
The Ichikawa Zoo went into special care for Punch, including hand-feeding, and looking for socialization substitutes for Punch, including rolled towels and plushies. The one Punch chose was from Ikea, a brown orangutan. (We don’t have apes in the Philippines except in zoos. Orangutans are native to Borneo and Sumatra.) Punch would drag its plushie everywhere, cuddling and embracing it, especially when rejected by its fellow macaques.
Eventually, though, Punch and the other macaques began to socialize, and it looks like Punch is well on its way to integrating with other monkeys.
What we’re seeing is the formation of attachment bonds, which are found in so many species of animals and are essential for healthy physical and psychological development, especially during childhood. Primatologists first thought that bonds could develop only between mothers and their offspring, but we now know that bonding between males (fathers and their offspring) is also important. Even more importantly, the bonds can be with surrogates, like humans, such as the zoo carers. You’ll find many posts showing Punch clinging to the leg of one such zoo staff or holding on to his head.
There’s also “bonding” with inanimate replicas, i.e., the Ikea plushies. In other words, it seems the clingy physical contact is powerful enough to provide comfort and attachment, which is why the plushies are such bestsellers for children’s gifts (and, for not so young adults, all the way up to lolo and lola).
In the 1950s, experiments by an American researcher, Harry Harlow, also found that juvenile monkeys offered a choice between “wire” monkey replicas with food and soft towel monkey replicas without food, went for the towel ones, in other words, never mind if there’s no food, what I want is something cuddly and maternal. Think about it: Were we meant to evolve to be clingy? (I’m cringing right now!)
But another way of looking at it is that maybe we were meant to be lovey-dovey. I’ve seen photographs that show animal siblings and litter mates quite close to being loving, looking like human kuya and ate caring for their bunso, which includes grooming and play. Watch the young ones too, imitating their older siblings and following older ones in a procession. Going back to Punch’s internet posts, you’ll find it close to adoring their zookeepers!
On the negative side, as we see in the case of Punch, parental rejection set off by adverse circumstances can be disastrous. In times of war and disasters, we see in both humans and nonhumans fierce attempts by mothers to protect their young, but conversely, war’s stress can also result in maternal rejection, even mothers killing their young.
Anthropology is going to be more exciting in the years to come as we study our nonhuman relatives and discover they, too, have complex social relationships. You can start by looking up YouTube and social media posts for Punch, with daily posts now in different languages!
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michael.tan@inquirer.net
