They said that Planet of the Apes was fiction. They were wrong! Some of us have always had an inkling that monkeys are far smarter than they let on. And now they’ve figured out what they have to do to escape zoos! Well, at least one monkey has that information. But I’m pretty sure others will soon follow suit.
Visitors at Zhengzhou Zoo in Central China were witnesses to an amazing sight: a cute monkey used a stone to break the glass wall of its enclosure. However, zoo visitors weren’t the only ones surprised — the Columbian white-faced Capuchin scarpered once it realized what it had done.
The Daily Mail writes that one tourist, Mr. Wang, said that “the monkey was sharpening the stone, then it started hitting it on the glass. The monkey scared itself away, but it came back to take another look and even touched it.” Was what the monkey did simply an accident? Or was the Capuchin only pretending to be scared at first, so we wouldn’t suspect it had other nefarious plans?
Meanwhile, one of the zoo’s staff Tian Shuliao told the media that “this monkey is unlike other monkeys. This one knows how to use tools to break walnuts. When we feed walnuts to other monkeys, they only know to bite it. But it had never hit the glass before though. This is the first time. It’s toughened glass, so it would never have got out. After it happened, we picked up all the rocks and took away all its ‘weapons’.”
As surprising as it sounds, quite a few members of the animal kingdom know how to use tools, and not all of them are monkeys. According to Live Science, chimpanzees use stone tools and even make spears for hunting other primates. While crows use a wide range of tools, from twigs to their own feathers.
Sea animals are crafty as well. Everyone’s beloved sea otters (the incredibly fuzzy ones) use rocks to hit abalone shells off of stones and crack them open. Octopuses, on the other hand, go for a more defensive application of tools: they use coconut shells as portable armor.