Shikano was not allowed to hold him. 🥺🐒

👇 Quick TLDR Of What The Keepers Actually Did Below!! 👇

There is a clip I keep going back to. Shikano is kneeling in the enclosure scattering carrots, and Punch-kun is circling him on two legs picking them up. Ordinary footage. And then you notice his hands.

They are clenched into fists. And the moment our boy moves round behind him, they relax and open. Then he comes back round the front and they close again.

That is a man physically stopping his own hands from reaching out to a monkey he raised from a newborn. On camera, in front of visitors, every working day, for a year.

👇 WHAT HAND REARING ACTUALLY INVOLVED 👇

A newborn macaque cannot thermoregulate, cannot move independently, and survives by gripping its mother's fur and staying there for months. The contact is near continuous, and it is not affection, it is a physiological system. Warmth, feeding, and the regulation of stress.

Hand rearing means round the clock feeding on a schedule measured in hours, constant monitoring of weight and temperature, strict hygiene because an infant with no maternal antibodies is vulnerable to things an adult would shrug off, and somebody physically present through the night for weeks.

And it means the problem with no clean solution. An infant needs something to hold, and the only thing available is a person. Every hour spent gripping a human is an hour spent learning that humans are what safety feels like.

👇 WHY THE NO CONTACT POLICY EXISTS 👇

A young macaque learns what it is by watching. Which faces to read, which postures mean danger, which signals invite and which warn off. An infant attached to humans learns the wrong vocabulary entirely, and does not learn the macaque version because it was not looking at macaques.

The outcome is an animal that is physically a macaque and socially is not. It does not die. It lives a long life at the edge of its own species, going to a fence every day looking for people.

And the window for learning this does not stay open. So the withdrawal has to begin while the animal still desperately wants the contact. There is no version where you wait until he is ready. He is never ready.

👇 WHAT IT COST THEM 👇

A great many people found the policy cruel at the time, and said so. Nobody from Ichikawa went online to argue. They simply carried on doing the thing that looked cruel, because it was correct.

And one comment from a viewer has stayed with me. Somebody wrote that Punch's growth must be wonderful for the keepers, but that when an animal has been that attached to you, it must surely be lonely.

Every milestone in this story is also a small loss for those two. He went to the troop instead of the door. He got down off the leg. He stopped looking for them when he was frightened. All of it is success, and all of it is them being needed slightly less.

👇 AND IT WAS NEVER NO RELATIONSHIP 👇

It was no dependence, which is a completely different objective. The goal was never for him to forget them. It was for him to stop needing them in order to function.

Which is why he can sit on a shoulder at feeding time now. He no longer runs to a door when he is frightened, so the contact that remains is not a problem any more.

There is footage from this week of Miyakoshi outside the enclosure looking genuinely sad, and Miyakoshi inside it minutes later, beaming, with our boy on his shoulder. Same man.

That answers the question of whether any of this was easy for them. 💛

🇯🇵 日本の皆様へ:
何度も見返してしまう映像があります。鹿野さんが膝をついてニンジンをまき、その周りをパンチ君が二本足で歩きながら拾っています。ごく普通の光景です。しかし、手をご覧ください。固く握りしめられています。そしてパンチ君が背後に回った瞬間、その手はふっとゆるむのです。生まれたときから育てた相手に、手を伸ばさないよう自分を抑えている。それを一年間、人目のあるなかで毎日続けてきたのです。人工哺育には、数時間ごとの授乳、体重と体温の常時管理、厳格な衛生管理、そして夜通しの付き添いが必要です。それでも最大の問題は別にあります。赤ちゃんザルはしがみつく相手を必要とし、その相手が人間しかいないということ。人にしがみついた時間は、そのまま「人間こそが安心だ」と学ぶ時間になってしまいます。だから「非接触」が必要でした。それは「関係を断つ」ことではなく、「依存をなくす」ことです。今パンチ君が肩に乗れるのは、もう扉のほうへ走っていかなくなったからなのです。

Thank you to the incredible Punch Family for making this community so special. 💛

#panchi #市川市動植物園 #ichikawazoo #ニホンザル #サル山 #PunchKun #鹿野