YouTubers’ abuse of monkeys at temple under investigation
SIEM REAP, Cambodia — A baby monkey struggles and squirms as it tries to escape the man holding it by the neck over a concrete cistern, repeatedly dousing it with water.
In another video clip, a person plays with the genitals of a juvenile male macaque sitting on a limestone block from an ancient temple to get it excited for the camera.
The abuse of monkeys at the Angkor UNESCO World Heritage Site in northwestern Cambodia is not always so graphic, but authorities say it is a growing problem as people look for new ways to draw online viewers to generate cash.
“The monkey should be living in the wild, where they are supposed to be living, but the monkey nowadays is being treated like a domestic pet,” said Long Kosal, spokesperson for APSARA, the Cambodian office that oversees the Angkor archaeological site.
“They’re making the content to earn money by having the viewers on YouTube, so this is a very big issue for us.”
APSARA has few tools itself to stop the YouTubers from filming in general, but has opened an investigation with the Ministry of Agriculture to collect evidence for legal action against the most serious abusers — who are rarely on camera themselves, Long Kosal said.
“If we can build a case, they will be arrested for sure,” he said. “Any animal abuser will be seriously punished by law in Cambodia.”
YouTube, Facebook and other sites remove the videos with graphic content, but scores of other clips of cute monkeys jumping and playing remain, generating thousands of views and subscribers.
Just making those videos involves very close interaction with the monkeys, however, which authorities and animalrights activists say creates a host of other problems, both for the macaques and people visiting one of Southeast Asia’s most popular tourist sites.
On a recent day outside Angkor’s famous 12th-century Bayon Temple, at least a dozen YouTubers, all young men, crowded around a small group of longtailed macaques, pushing in close to get shots of a mother with a baby on her back and tracking her everywhere she moved.
The wild monkeys feasted on bananas tossed to them by YouTubers and drank from plastic bottles of water.
A blue-shirted APSARA warden looked on but those filming were unfazed, illustrating the main problem: Simply taking video of monkeys is OK, even though feeding them is frowned upon. At the same time, it’s making them dependent upon handouts, and the close interaction with humans means they’re becoming aggressive toward tourists.