Animal Welfare: Knight of the Coconut Economy

Moral issues often depend on the point of view from which one looks at the world. Wherever Suthipong Nakwichian, 59, says, he is an animal lover. His five-year-old monkey, Khun Thong, climbs ten meters above him in the palm trees to harvest coconuts. With the rich, gentle thump of a bowling ball, another nut lands on the soft ground. Khun Thong is one of around 3,000 macaques that were trained in Thailand to help with the coconut harvest. He works his way to the next nut in the palm tree, looks at it with a connoisseur’s face, turns it a few times in a circle until it detaches from the stem, then bites through the rest of the stalk. Oomph.

Nakwichian loves his monkey, he describes him as a family member. “Khun Thong is the first to be fed when it is tight,” says its owner. But since the German supermarket chain Rewe decided not to sell the “Chaokoh” brand of coconut milk because the nuts are obtained with the help of picking monkeys, Nakwichian and his colleagues have had to grapple with the fact that in other parts of the world they are considered animal abusers.

The popularity of coconut milk has grown steadily in recent years, also because a small but increasing number of sensitive customers want a vegan diet and do without cow’s milk. In 2021, Rewe was named the “most vegan-friendly supermarket” by the animal welfare organization Peta, and about a month ago the organization again spoke out against the use of the monkeys in Thailand – “Held on short chains and locked in tiny cages for transport, they are also exploited for products of the Chaokoh brand, which is available in Germany, “said the corresponding press release.

The monkeys have been helping with the harvest for generations, mainly in southern Thailand, such as in the province of Prachuap Khiri Khan. When the first reports from Peta went around the world in 2019, they weren’t upset at first, but rather scared. Because it does not correspond to the image that they have of themselves. “I live with and from this monkey, I would never treat it badly,” says Nakwichian. Khun Thong stretches up to him, sniffs his master’s belly. Khun means “honored” or “honored” in Thai, it is considered a respectful form of address.

A well-trained, fully grown macaque is worth around 100,000 Bath, around 2500 euros, which is a lot of money in this part of the world. Those who accompany the monkeys and their owners at work can see how the macaques are fed and cared for. When they don’t feel like it anymore, the keepers pluck at the long string that the monkeys are led by, but it’s already noon, too hot to pick, even for the monkeys, so they get a break. You have to pay attention to their whims, otherwise they won’t work. Of course, there are also animal abusers among the keepers who pull their monkeys’ fangs and hold them badly, “perhaps one in a hundred,” as Nakwichian suspects.

But this is almost a game, the monkeys are looked after and employed, what about keeping or slaughtering animals in Europe, with the cattle, the pigs and the horses? This is how the discussion goes on on the coconut plantation. But which animal is worse and where is not the question – “the monkeys are definitely also doing badly”, says Lisa Kainz, 32, specialist advisor for animals in the food industry at Peta Germany. “But I definitely don’t want to point my finger at Thailand and denounce the circumstances there.” Peta also speaks out against tying a German cow into the stable, slaughtering pigs or keeping chickens in battery cages – only the response to the actions is different. The abbreviation Peta stands for “People for Ethic Treatment of Animals” – that is, people for the ethically correct treatment of animals. And of course it is not appropriate to keep the monkeys isolated and to hunt them up in the trees. The fact that other farm animals are worse off in other parts of the world does not matter.

Open detailed view

Speciesism is the term the organization subscribes to. Comparable to sexism or racism, living beings should not be discriminated against because of their species affiliation. There is nothing wrong with that, it is difficult to explain in a structurally weak region in Thailand, where there are not many opportunities to earn a living besides palm plantations and animal husbandry. Pisit Phatthong, 59 years old, plantation owner and something like the community leader of the district, does not understand these arguments, until today. When the first Peta report got through the press, he called his colleagues together to explain himself. But the matter could not be resolved with arguments. “Journalists only ever reported about scared animals. Videos of panicked monkeys in the cage went viral,” explains Phatthong, “but that is easy to film a monkey in a panic. They are scared and often aggressive, also with each other and in the wild. They are just animals. “

With spectacular actions against fur, Peta attracted attention at fashion shows, but it can also be quieter. “For example, I tried to get manufacturers to take eggs out of their range because the egg industry in Germany is a great evil,” says Lisa Kainz via video call. “It worked in some places. Schneekoppe and Seitenbacher got out of their way, the press wrote about it locally. However, it is easier to report on the coconut problem because it only affects us in small parts without us having to change our entire eating habits “, explains Kainz, while a Romanian street dog is dozing next to her.

Long-tailed macaques, which are found throughout Southeast Asia, are considered to be very intelligent and social animals. They live in associations that have a strong hierarchical structure, similar to people. Keeping them one by one makes them lonely and neurotic, and they cannot be released back into the wild. The monkey owners in Prachuab Khiri Khan compare this to keeping a dog or a cat in Germany. And they measure it by how they deal with monkeys elsewhere: since the tourists stayed away due to the pandemic, urban monkeys, for example, have become a nuisance in some parts of Southeast Asia: They steal and bite, so they are caught, released in the forest where they starve, or for medical purposes Experiments sold. It is unlikely that one would do the picking monkeys a short-term favor by making them and their owners unemployed. It’s more about the apes of the future.

But the trained animals are still there. “When he’s old and my car has been paid off, then I want to give Khun Thong a good evening,” says Suthipong Nakwichian. Until then, however, the macaque still has to pick a lot of coconuts, not only to earn its food, but also that of the family of its owner. There is one bath for every nut picked. That is 0.0259 euros. A good monkey should be able to harvest up to 1500 nuts per day. Is that fun for him? Does the horse like to be ridden? Does the dog like to leash? Maybe depends on the alternatives. In Prachuab Khiri Khan, the picking monkeys are dying out anyway, around 15,000 once. The remaining monkey owners come to work on old mopeds with rusty sidecars, not in the sparkling SUV like the politicians in distant Bangkok.

“Personally, I feel sorry for the individual people,” says Lisa Kainz from Peta. “But we speak out against animals being treated like a commodity all over the world. And to achieve an effect, you have to put financial pressure on,” Kainz knows from experience, “asking friendly questions doesn’t help.” The Thai government has a duty, Peta Asia has also written to them, but nothing has happened, hence the boycott. This is not directed against the monkey owners, “in this case it is also about consumer information”, as Kainz says.

Open detailed view

Vegans are a sensitive group of buyers who definitely associate their food intake with ideological convictions. Not only do they forego meat, but drink coconut or soy milk instead of cow’s milk, so it would be bizarre to torture the monkeys instead of the cattle. Why do you bother when the animals are just miserable elsewhere? You just have to be able to afford these thoughts. In the gentrified milieus of major German cities, one has different worries than in the poor south of Thailand.

Thailand is the second largest exporter of coconuts after Indonesia. They felt the effect of the first Peta report in Prachuab Khiri Khan immediately. Because of the pandemic, things are not going well anyway, but even in Thailand coconuts from Indonesia are now being sold because they can be harvested more cheaply there, regardless of animal or human rights. This is another reason why the monkey keepers in Prachuap Khiri Kahn do not understand what they are doing wrong.

And why, of all people, they are targeted. After all, there are hundreds of products on the shelves in German supermarkets and also at Rewe, which are made with the addition of palm oil, from shower gel to bread spread, slash and burn, slave-like working conditions for people and animals and orangutan orphans in Indonesia and Malaysia Consequence. Not only every vegan knows that, but every bright child today knows that. It’s just a lot more complicated to go without palm oil than to go without coconut milk. It’s more of the small sacrifice that anyone can easily make. Whether this helps the monkeys is a question of the point of view that one takes.