“TO us, it’s just a toy. To him, it’s the mother he lost.” I read that comment under a viral video and stopped scrolling. Someone had written about Punch, a baby macaque at a zoo in Japan, abandoned by his mother and given a stuffed orangutan by zoo staff to sleep with, to carry, to hold in moments of fear. I am not someone who is easily undone by animal videos. But I have not had my mother for 30 years now, and something about that sentence — the particular grammar of loss it described — caught me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

I watched the video. Then I watched it again. Then I went looking for updates.

Footage of Punch clutching that toy — his surrogate mother, his safety blanket, his entire world — has been viewed some 15 million times. He received around 2m likes on a single video. He has a handler the internet has named ‘Punch Daddy’. He has adoptive mothers among the other monkeys in his enclosure. He has, in the words of one commenter, “got the whole world hooked on him”.

It is a genuinely moving story. I do not begrudge Punch his viral moment or the humans who find comfort in it. He is a small, frightened creature........

© Dawn