In July 2025, a baby Japanese macaque was born at Ichikawa City Zoo near Tokyo. His mother, a first-time parent, rejected him almost immediately after birth. Zookeepers named him Punch and stepped in to hand-raise him around the clock.
When he was old enough to join the troop in January 2026, it didn’t go well. The other monkeys ignored him, bullied him, and left him alone on the edges of the enclosure while they interacted with each other. Punch had no mother to teach him how to communicate, no siblings to play with, and no idea how to fit in.
So zookeepers gave him a stuffed orangutan from IKEA. Punch named it Mo and carried it everywhere. To sleep. To eat. To hide behind when the bullying got too much. For millions of people watching online, the image of a tiny monkey dragging a plush toy around an enclosure because he had nothing else broke something open. The hashtag HangInTherePunch spread worldwide. People cried at their phones over a monkey they’d never met.
Slowly, things changed. Punch started approaching other monkeys on his own. He learned the social rules of the troop the hard way, getting scolded, corrected, and occasionally dragged across the enclosure. But he kept trying. By March 2026, he was hitching rides on other monkeys’ backs and playing with peers for the first time.
And now, the monkey who once had only a stuffed toy for company, who spent his first months alone and frightened while the world watched, is now reportedly the one who seeks out the newest, loneliest monkeys entering the exhibit and stays close to them.
He became what he once needed.
Rejected by His Mother, This Baby Monkey Found Comfort in a Stuffed Toy
