{"id":311456,"date":"2026-03-03T20:19:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T20:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/311456\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T20:19:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T20:19:10","slug":"tiktok-loves-the-japanese-baby-monkey-punch-will-he-be-okay-short-wave-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/311456\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok loves the Japanese baby monkey Punch. Will he be okay? : Short Wave : NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

\n Baby monkey ‘Punch’ drags a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa Zoo, Chiba Prefecture, Japan.<\/p>\n

Kim Kyung-Hoon\/Reuters<\/p>\n

hide caption\n <\/p>\n

toggle caption<\/p>\n

Kim Kyung-Hoon\/Reuters<\/p>\n

If you’ve been on the internet in the past few weeks, chances are you’ve seen him: a tiny gray-brown monkey dragging a big, stuffed orangutan around Japan’s Ichikawa Zoo.<\/p>\n

His name? Punch-kun, or Punch for short.<\/p>\n

His story? Early abandonment by his mother, careful treatment from local zookeepers and instant social media fame.<\/p>\n

But are all the (human) primates jumping to Punch’s defense justified? And what’s normal for Japanese macaque society, anyway? To find out, NPR’s Katia Riddle<\/a> chats with psychology professor and animal expert Lauren Robinson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Interested in more animal science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org\/shortwave<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify<\/a> and Apple Podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and Arundathi Nair. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Baby monkey ‘Punch’ drags a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa Zoo, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. Kim Kyung-Hoon\/Reuters hide caption toggle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311457,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-311456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}