No mousetrap, no problem.
Footage captures the horrifc moment vengeful monkeys beat and attempted to drown a thieving rat for stealing their food at a zoo in China. Video of their medieval justice-serving method is currently going viral online.
“I guess they were not impressed at the rat stealing their food,” the anonymous videographer told Asia Wire of the incident, captured at an undisclosed wild animal park in Quzhou, Zhejiang Province.
The wild footage starts off innocuously enough with rats running back and forth between the monkey’s food box and the rocks in the enclosure. Things take a turn after one of the freeloading rodents gets spotted during its grub-grabbing attempt, whereupon it tries to hide under the food box.
However, the intelligent simians flush out the plague-spreading party crasher, which is promptly picked up by one of the animals. The vengeful monkey then proceeds to twirl the rat in the air like a sentient discus and then hurl it against the ground violently. One of the furry exterminators then takes the dazed varmint over to their swimming hole and submerges it under water several times.
Finally, seemingly satisfied that it’s drowned, Furious George brings the waterlogged vermin back onto dry land, where it lies motionless.
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However, it turns out that Templeton was just playing opossum: when the primate loosens its grip, the rat reanimates and scurries down into a hole in the rocks where the primates can’t get to it.
The witness, named on as Mrs. Dong by Asia Wire, was flabbergasted over the Hamurabi’s code-esque example of interspecies comeuppance. “I have seen the rats before and I [didn’t think] that they weren’t disturbing the monkeys, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be beaten,” she exclaimed.
It’s yet unclear if these particular monkeys were consciously trying to punish the rat for stealing. However, “studies have shown that chimpanzees and macaques not only seek revenge, but often do so intelligently — for instance, if they see that their adversary is stronger than them, they attack a weaker relative instead,” the Telegraph reported.
In far more brutal example of simian vengeance in 2021, murderous macaques in India threw 250 dogs off the tops of trees and buildings as apparent revenge for killing one of their babies.
Authorities subsequently rounded up two of the primates who were allegedly involved in the massacre.