1 / 5 | Yuji: the Mexican baby monkey who finds comfort in a stuffed companion. Yuji, a six-week-old paw monkey in Mexico, wakes up every day clutching a stuffed dog. – Ruiz Shelter
Yujia six-week-old pawed monkey in Mexicowakes up every day clinging to a stuffed dog. More than a toy, this stuffed companion acts as a surrogate mother after he was rejected by his own mother, Kamaria, a new mother unable to form a maternal bond.
Weighing only 673 grams, Yuji represents the most recent case of assisted breeding at the Guadalajara Zoo, in western Mexico.
Yuji’s story has captured the attention of the Mexican public, establishing parallels with Punchthe Japanese macaque who went viral on social media after growing up clinging to a stuffed orangutan after his mother rejected him.
Unlike Punch, Yuji has yet to come into physical contact with other members of his species; He spends most of his time inside a monkey cage at the Guadalajara Zoo’s Comprehensive Center for Animal Medicine and Welfare, CIMBA, where he is under the care of 12 veterinarians and biologists.
No date has been set for Yuji’s move to a habitat shared with 12 other adult paw monkeys and three other babies. That will depend on when he is weaned from an exclusively dairy diet and begins a full adult diet with fruits and vegetables, said veterinarian Iván Reynoso Ruiz, head of the primate section at the Guadalajara Zoo. That could happen when Yuji is about six months old, he said.
A few hours after giving birth, on March 3, Kamaria began to exhibit irregular behavior. He struggled to properly hold his firstborn, who could not hold on to his mother.
After noticing a problem, caregivers separated the mother from her newborn, who weighed only 443 grams (less than a pound) and required immediate placement in a CIMBA incubator to stabilize his temperature and safeguard his health, Reynoso Ruiz explained.
This was the beginning of assisted baby rearing, a process often used by zoos to protect the health and development of at-risk offspring. A caretaker named him Yuji, after a popular Japanese manga character.
During his first weeks, Yuji was watched 24 hours a day and was bottle-fed with fortified milk.
From the beginning, Yuji was given a stuffed animal as comfort. Reynoso Ruiz explained that the toy fulfills the function of a mother by being her main source of security. To maintain hygiene, staff rotate the original stuffed dog with two other toys – a bear and a monkey – to ensure you always have a clean companion.
To encourage his development, keepers equipped Yuji’s cage with a small hammock and ropes. When she started gaining weight and sleeping more hours, the team adjusted her eating schedule. Now Yuji receives the first of his four daily bottles at 7 in the morning.
Although Punch and Yuji’s stories have been popular on social media, some animal rights advocates oppose the practice of assisted breeding.
Diana Valencia, animal rights activist, maintains that there is no substitute for a natural habitat, and that animals “have the right to be born, grow, develop and die where they belong.”
In response to these criticisms, the Guadalajara Zoo primate expert stressed that modern zoos offer a unique opportunity to protect species from global threats. He said that the intervention was a matter of life and death, and that Yuji would have likely perished in the wild without a “second chance” of survival.