Watch the moment the mother monkey cradles her dead baby in the video below.
Video credit: CGTN
A heartbreaking video clip showing a mother monkey cradling the dead body of her newborn baby has emerged on the internet.
The mother can be seen refusing to let go of the lifeless baby who died after two days of birth at a Chinese zoo.
In the footage, the distraught mother is seen sitting in a zoo enclosure with her infant tightly draped in her arms. She constantly strokes the baby monkey’s forehead and kisses its cheeks in a bid to wake it up.
The incident happened at the Xiangyang Zoo in Hubei province, in north-west China, on Monday.
In another clip, the three-year-old mother was seen placing the baby on the ground only to keep a close watch at it with a dejected expression.
The adult monkey who gave birth to her baby on May 4 was a first-time mother, keepers at the zoo told Xiangyang Television.
However, the baby wasn’t born healthy and the mother didn’t let the zoo caretakers approach it, zookeeper Liang Xinkuan said.
Consequently, the infant died of lack of nutrition just two days later.
‘Since then, the mother has been cradling her dead offspring and refusing to let go,’ Geng Jianqiao, manager at the zoo, said.
The mother would hold the dead baby even more tightly, whenever zookeepers tried to approach it.
Internet users were extremely saddened by the tragic incident after the story went viral. Many animal-lovers blamed the zoo for the happening.
‘Animals are just as sensitive as us humans, if not more,’ one internet user commented on Chinese microblogging site Weibo.
‘This is the power of a mother’s love,’ a second said.
‘As a new mother myself, I cried watching them,’ another wrote.
‘How come the zoo didn’t take proper care of the baby monkey after it was born?’ one person asked.
‘They should have taken better care of the pregnant monkey. The zoo has done a poor job in managing the incident,’ another added.
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