Early in 2026, footage of punch, a young Japanese macaque, went viral after his mother rejected him and he formed a bond with a cuddly toy orangutan.
The bereft-looking furball stole hearts as he cuddled up with his comforter at Japan’s Ichikawa City Zoo. While the story made for great social media coverage, the phenomenon is remarkably common in animals.
Many birds, for example, practice what’s called brood reduction. When faced with multiple mouths to feed, some parents choose to prioritise feeding the older, stronger chicks at the expense of the weaker ones, which may then perish.
This often occurs when food is scarce because, when it comes to a parent passing on its genes to the next generation, it’s better to concentrate on having some chicks survive than risk all of them dying.
Brood reduction also has benefits for the parents. A 2025 study of blue-footed boobies found that mothers of reduced broods were 16 per cent more likely to survive the next breeding season than mothers of intact broods.
So, mothers that downsize their families aren’t just prioritising the health of their bloodline – they’re putting their own health first.
When an ‘only child’ is rejected, as happened to Punch, it can seem particularly brutal. But again, it’s not on a whim.
As with Japanese macaques, night monkeys typically give birth to just one offspring. And like macaques, sometimes they stop feeding them. Without extra help, the rejected babies will probably die, but the likelihood of parental survival is increased.
Studies of captive night monkeys demonstrate that parents of rejected offspring live, on average, four years longer than those who keep their young.
In these situations, rejection typically happens either when the mother lacks experience or because there’s something stressful happening in the environment.
In Punch’s case, it was a double whammy: he was born to a first-time mother during a heatwave. Instead of caring for an infant in challenging circumstances, she chose, intuitively, to cut and run.
This decision may have been shaped by her own experiences. When rejected night monkeys are nurtured to adulthood in captivity, then breed, they are more likely to reject their own offspring. The behaviour is transmitted epigenetically via inherited patterns of gene expression.
Top image: a male macaque monkey named Punch, who was abandoned by his mother shortly after birth, sitting with a stuffed orangutan toy at Ichikawa City Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Chiba Prefecture. Taken on 19th February 2026. Credit: JIJI PRESS / AFP via Getty Images
