Mike White Speaks Up for Baby Monkeys Whose Suffering Was Documented in PETA’s Exposé
After Mike White finished filming the third season of his highly anticipated Emmy Award–winning HBO series The White Lotus in Thailand, PETA sent the auteur undercover footage of baby monkeys chained up at coconut-picking “schools” in Thailand.
The esteemed creator dropped everything to write directly to the Thai government about this issue. In his letter to Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, he urged compassion for the endangered and vulnerable baby monkeys exploited by the Thai coconut industry:
I have just finished filming season three of The White Lotus on Samui. It’s a beautiful place, but I was shocked to learn from my friends at [PETA] that there and elsewhere in Thailand, monkeys are forced to work for the coconut industry. I urge you to end this exploitation of our fellow primates and ensure that Thailand’s entire coconut industry transitions to humane harvesting methods that don’t rely on forced monkey labor.”
Baby Monkeys Chained, Isolated, and Broken in Spirit Inside ‘School of Horrors’
PETA’s bombshell exposé of monkey training schools takes viewers inside the facilities that force endangered and vulnerable baby pig-tailed macaques to pick coconuts.
Investigators witnessed social, sensitive monkeys who were just months old, all alone, and tethered on ropes so short that they could barely move. In their natural habitat, pig-tailed macaques often stay with their nurturing mothers for years.
They live in large, complex social groups in which they forage, sleep, and eat together. At Thailand’s coconut-picking schools, investigators documented baby monkeys desperately clinging to each other for comfort.
Monkeys paced neurotically, and some ran frantically while attached to tethers, repeatedly choking themselves on their collars and twisting their tiny necks.
In his letter to the prime minister, White added that in these horrific schools, “[b]aby monkeys, who have been torn away from their mothers and are deprived of everything that’s natural and important to them, are ‘broken’ and forced to serve as coconut-picking machines for the rest of their lives. Undercover video footage acquired from these ‘schools’ reveals traumatized and terrified infants who have been bred in captivity or abducted from their jungle homes and families.”
These facilities—which are promoted to tourists on the Thai government website—put on deceptive coconut-picking demonstrations for visitors that involve adult monkeys who have been abused and broken.
Join Mike White in Speaking Up Against Monkey Abuse
This latest exposé reveals how a lifetime on the end of a chain starts for baby monkeys exploited by the Thai coconut industry. You can take action for these endangered and vulnerable animals by urging the Thai government to shut down coconut-picking schools and ban monkey labor today:
