A young monkey squirmed and tried to escape from a man who choked it on a concrete reservoir and repeatedly poured water on it.
In another video clip, a person plays with the genitals of a young male macaque sitting on limestone blocks in an ancient temple to get it excited for the camera.
Abuse of monkeys at Angkor Wat, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northwest Cambodia, hasn’t always been graphic, but authorities say it’s a growing problem as people look for new ways to attract online audiences to make money.
“Monkeys should live in the wild, they should live there, but now monkeys are treated as domestic pets,” said Long Kosal, spokesman for APSARA, the Cambodian office that oversees the Angkor archaeological site.
“They’re producing content to monetize viewers on YouTube, so that’s a very big problem for us.”
Long Kosal said APSARA itself has few tools to stop YouTube users from filming in general, but has launched investigations with the Ministry of Agriculture to gather evidence and take legal action against the worst abusers, who rarely appear on camera themselves. .
“If we can open a case, they will definitely be arrested,” he said. “In Cambodia, anyone who abuses animals will be severely punished by law.”
YouTube, Facebook and other sites removed the video with graphic content, but dozens of other videos of cute monkeys jumping and playing remained, generating thousands of views and subscriptions.
However, just making these videos requires very close interaction with the monkeys, which authorities and animal rights activists say creates a host of other problems for the macaques and the people who visit one of Southeast Asia’s most popular tourist attractions.
On a recent day outside Angkor’s famed 12th-century Bayon temple, at least a dozen YouTubers, all young, gathered around a small group of long-tailed macaques, closely filming a mother carrying a baby on her back and whatever. They follow her wherever she goes.
Wild monkeys eat bananas thrown to them by YouTubers and drink water from plastic bottles. A young macaque briefly entertained himself with a half-eaten neon green popsicle thrown on the side of the road before tossing it onto a banana.
An APSARA warden in a blue shirt looked on, but those filming were unfazed, which illustrates the main point: simply filming the monkeys is OK, although feeding them is not. At the same time, this makes them dependent on handouts, while close interaction with humans means they are increasingly aggressive towards visitors.
“Tourists bring food, and they take it away,” Roncosar said, flipping through several photos on his phone of recent injuries by macaques. “If tourists resist, they will bite, which is very dangerous.”
He added that seeking food from tourists also attracted monkeys from the surrounding jungle to the ancient site, where they pulled away fragments of the temple and caused other damage.
Tourist Cadi Hutchings made sure to keep her distance from the monkeys after her tour guide warned her of the increasing risk of being bitten.
“They want your food, but you also need to understand that there needs to be a line between human interference in nature,” said the 23-year-old from Wales. “Obviously it’s great to have so many tourists coming here because it’s such a lovely place, but at the same time you have to be careful that with more and more people… the monkeys won’t take to it too well environment.”
However, many other tourists stopped to snap photos and videos of themselves before heading to the nearby temple ruins, with some holding up bananas to bring them closer.
YouTuber Ium Daro started filming Angkor Wat monkeys about three months ago, using a selfie stick to hold up his iPhone as he followed a mother and baby down a dirt road to get a closer look.
The 41-year-old said he had not seen any monkeys being physically abused and he saw no problem with what he and others were doing to make a living.
“The monkeys here are friendly,” he said. “After we take their picture, we give them food, so it’s like we’re paying them for the opportunity to take their picture.”
As he spoke, a young macaque climbed onto the leg of a bystander and tried unsuccessfully to grab a plastic bottle of water from his pocket.
A YouTuber says he started filming monkeys after plummeting tourist numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic left him unable to make a living as a tuk-tuk driver.
Darrow said he was looking for a way to supplement his income as a rice vendor, but he was new to it and hadn’t realized much in return.
Many, like Phut Phu, are salaried employees of YouTube page operators.
The 24-year-old said he started photographing monkeys 2 1/2 years ago when he was looking for an open-air job to help with lung problems.
He usually works from 7am to 5pm every day, earning $200 a month – the equivalent of a minimum wage job in Cambodia – and said he hopes the authorities don’t try to stop the situation.
“I need these monkeys,” he said, holding up a Nikon Coolpix camera with superzoom provided by his employer, the same model used by most YouTubers.
Long Kosal said APSARA’s task is difficult because of the difficulty of identifying and catching those responsible for physically abusing the monkeys, coupled with the easy money that can be made from YouTube videos.
“That’s a problem for us,” he said. “We need to find good reasons to oppose them and not be satisfied by abusing monkeys.”
For Nick Marx, director of wildlife rescue and care at the Wildlife Alliance, which runs conservation programs in Southeast Asia and is involved in returning wild animals to Angkor, the answer is simple, if perhaps equally elusive.
“The biggest problem is these [videos] It’s about making money,” he said in an interview in Phnom Penh. “If people who don’t like this kind of stuff stop watching them, it would really help address the issue of abuse. “
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