Woman climbs into spider monkey enclosure to feed them Hot Cheetos

by MikeB · May 24, 2021

Geoffroy’s spider monkey. Image by Markéta Machová from Pixabay

It looks like this woman wanted to make a short Instagram video for her social page and took a big risk. Spider monkeys are quite small but dangerous. Monkeys are stronger than people imagine. I remember a woman putting her arm through the bars of a chimpanzee cage at a private zoo in the US and the monkey ripped it off. Another private zoo disaster. The zookeeper in the video explains it all. This is El Paso Zoo in west Texas. She has been called lucky and stupid. And with Covid-19 remaining a real threat there is a possibility that she transmitted the disease to the monkeys as it is a zoonotic disease, as we know.

Zookeeper Mason Kleist said that she endangered herself and the monkeys. They have a special diet so the food she gave them was very inappropriate. It might do some harm although unlikely.

The monkey’s names are Libby and Sunday. Kleist said the monkeys could do substantial damage to a person. He was annoyed that the episode may damage the trust between the monkeys and zookeepers that they have built over the years. He said: “It’s going to take a long time to get them back to where they were.”

You can see the same video below on the Instagram account of fitfamelpaso. It has been viewed 125k times. Their cation is: “This is (unfortunately) real: A local woman crossed into the spider monkey enclosure at the @elpasozoo today and fed them… Hot Cheetos. #fitfamep”

The reason why the video is published twice on this page is because they not infrequently stop working as they are removed at source. If that has happened, I apologise.