Abandoned, a monkey from Morocco finds refuge thanks to the Amnéville zoo

The animal was spotted in May, when the teams were installing the "forest of the dinosaurs". "We started to see the canopy moving [...] we clearly saw that it was something bigger than a squirrel," says Thomas Grangeat, deputy zoological director at France bleu. It was a young female Barbary macaque, two or three years old, a species that the zoo does not have.

She was found on the opposite side of the park’s other primate area. It took the zoo about ten days to put in place a capture strategy, finding the animal "relatively emaciated". After its capture, the female was entrusted to a specialized shelter.

A protected species victim of abandonment and trafficking in Morocco

The presence of this Barbary macaque, a protected species native to Morocco and victim of illegal trafficking, remains a mystery. The zoo management favors the hypothesis of an abandonment by a private individual who had acquired it illegally.

The deputy director explains that this person was probably overwhelmed by the animal, which can become "very invasive and very destructive" if it is not in a suitable social environment. The abandonment coincides with a period when the zoo had communicated a lot on the reception of laboratory macaques.

"This person must have realized the foolishness they had done," explains Mr. Grangeat. "They dropped the animal on the outskirts of the park [...] probably thinking that if we were recovering laboratory macaques, we could well recover this one!"