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This video is brought to you by FarmKind. More about them at the end of the video. About 70 years ago, a new fad caught on: pet monkeys. At one point, more than a million Americans had monkeys in their homes. But things didn't go well. Hi, I'm David, and this is MinuteEarth. You can turn any wild animal into a pet; you just capture it and keep it. But while some wild animals are naturally good pets -because they are gentle and don't get too bothered by humans- most are just too wild. But we humans have figured out a way to turn some of those wilder wild animals into good pets -and even human helpers- through the process of domestication. But not monkeys, because not all animals are equally domesticatable.
Like, if you were to pick a good monkey to domesticate, you'd probably pick a capuchin like my friend Garfunkle here, who is just plain adorable -and smart and agile enough to maybe even help out. The first step toward domestication would be to capture a bunch of capuchins. Which would be hard enough, but you also have to keep them captured. And while some animals -like sheep and chickens- do just fine in confinement, capuchins are dextrous escape artists who are really hard to keep locked up in simple pens. You might end up with no monkeys at all. But say you could somehow make capuchin-proof pens, you'd then need to carefully breed the
monkeys to select for the traits you want - and to get rid of the ones you don't. And then you'd have to keep doing that over hundreds of generations. Animals like pigs can start giving birth when they're 6 months old, and can have 3 litters a year of 10 piglets each. So it's a relatively quick process to select for the traits you want. But capuchins take four years to mature and only have one baby every two years or so. So it would take a really, really long time to breed capuchins with the traits we want. But even if you had that kind of time, there's one additional problem: diseases.
Since capuchins have immune systems that are really similar to our own, they can give us all sorts of diseases, and maybe even brew up new primate plagues. So a capuchin domestication project would likely be a giant mess. That said, we have managed to domesticate the horse, which shares 2 of the 3 of those domestication difficulties. But horses had traits that could revolutionize transportation and farming and warfare, literally shaping our modern world, so at least in that case it paid off to go through the trouble of domesticating them. But the endgame for capuchins, on the other hand, would simply be cute pets - or maybe a helping
hand; domesticating them just wouldn't be worth the trouble - if it would even be possible at all. So what did happen with all those undomesticated pet monkeys that Americans brought into their homes? Well, it was monkey mayhem; within just a few years, primate sanctuaries started popping up to house all the monkeys people could no longer handle. It turns out that when it comes to keeping animals, it's mo' monkey, mo' problems. Of the animals we have been able to domesticate, some have become companions, some have become workers, and some have become, well, food.
And while we here at MinuteEarth disagree about whether it's ok to eat animals in general, we all agree that no animal deserves to be kept in cruel conditions like those on factory farms. That's where FarmKind comes in: Based on thousands of hours of expert research, they recommend the best charities that are working to end factory farming, so you can trust any donation you make through them will make a real difference. Your donation goes straight to charities that are freeing millions of animals from cruelty like battery cages, painful procedures without anaesthetic and inhumane slaughter.
We've donated to FarmKind, and if you feel able, we'd love for you to join us. The link is in the description: Use code minuteearth, and your donation will get a 50% boost. Plus, FarmKind doesn't take a cut of your donation: Their operating costs and this sponsorship are entirely grant-funded, so 100% of your donation can go directly to charity. So check them out and, together, let's make the world just a little bit kinder.
