Chained, whipped, beaten and forced to collect coconuts every day for many hours a day. A treatment that we would define as “inhuman” if it were applied to people. Instead it is applied to some monkeys in Thailand.
These are the allegations of the new report by Peta, the US non-profit organization that deals with animal welfare. At the center of attention is HelloFresh, a leading German company in the meal kit sector (packages of ready-to-cook foods) which Peta had already asked to leave Thailand at least as regards the production of coconut milk.
The images released by the organization, the result of a survey conducted in about fifty structures, document the prohibitive conditions in which the monkeys live, many of which have been kidnapped and separated from their families.
But the worst begins after the kidnapping. Monkeys are social animals, used to living in large groups. When they arrive at the farms or facilities where they will work for the rest of their lives, they are immediately segregated, chained or squeezed into small, dirty cages.
At that point, a very violent training based on beatings and other tortures begins which aims to transform the monkeys from sentient animals into coconut harvesting machines. Many of them, deprived of the possibility of interacting with other specimens of the same species, go crazy.
HelloFresh countered that its suppliers have signed declarations that they do not use monkeys to harvest the coconut. Thailand is one of ten producers of coconut milk in the world.
