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British Monkeys Are Doing Something Weird and It’s All Tourists’ Fault

The monkeys were self-medicating.

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Human junk food is so bad for you that some monkeys living on Gibraltar who have been eating our junk food have turned to eating soil to cope with it. This is according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers studying the roughly 200–300 macaques on Gibraltar noticed that the more time monkeys spent around tourists, the more likely they were to engage in geophagy, i.e., elaborate dirt-eating. In some cases, they were seen eating dirt immediately after downing ice cream, chips, chocolate, or whatever junk a careless tourist dropped on the ground. Monkeys........

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