Messy Monkeys

A still from the movie

A pair of macaques copulating grotesquely in the Yala wildlife park in Sri Lanka, Saturday, November 4, 2006. Here's the relevant video sequence.

In 2012, National Geographic Channel (Nat Geo Wild) contacted me with a request to include the footage in an episode of their World's Weirdest series.

After publishing on Wednesday, April 17, 2013 in an episode called Freaky Eats, it was available at http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/worlds-weirdest/videos/semen-slurping-macaque/ That page is now gone, but you can still see it at archive.org (NB the video won't work there).

It was nicely cut and professionally narrated, but I suspect that the commentary under the video appears to be mostly invented: "A low-ranking macaque secretly mates with the alpha male’s female and hides the evidence of the sexual encounter by eating it."

The Freaky Eats episode of World's Weirdest also has its own IMDB page at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10837140/

Perhaps even more weird is the fact that this video fragment of natural animal behaviour was found to be too harmful for viewers and

suddenly deleted from YouTube (after many years of availability) for "violating YouTube's policy on nudity or sexual content" (link)
Vimeo flagged it as "MATURE" (link)

These services naturally offer a lot of other animal mating videos. Why does the above video offend more than one of, say, mating dragonfies?

Is it because monkeys resemble humans more than insects?

Guess Google and Vimeo should then improve their policies and clearly state that not just humans but any primates may hence not be pictured mating or without their clothes on...

Tomáš Fülöpp

Yala, Sri Lanka

November 4, 2006

Parents

Sri Lanka (2006)