I came across this little fella yesterday. He is being kept as a pet by a family in a near by village. He’s probably about 3 weeks old and the family say they found him in the forest. Apparently they came across a troop of monkeys who were scared by them and ran off. As the troop ran off the mother dropped her infant. This does happen, especially with young infants and inexperienced mothers, but the mother would have returned for him if he’d been left. The family felt sorry for the baby monkey though and brought him home. In their defence they seem to genuinely care ft him, although their care is somewhat misguided (feeding him chocolate….). They’ve built him a cage to sleep in and let him out to run around in the daytime.
Keeping monkeys as pets is illegal, but as is so often the case in Indonesia, the law isn’t enforced. In fact it is often the police and forestry officials that tend to be the worst offenders when it comes to keeping protected species as pets!
So there’s not much that can be done now for this little guy. It’s too late to return him to his troop and the local forestry ranger won’t do anything (and even if he was confiscated there’s no where for him to go – he’d just end up in a cage behind the forestry dept office!) so all I can do is give the family sone advice about how to care for him and hope that when he gets a bit bigger he’ll run away, back to the forest. This has happened before, but sadly when they’re taken this young they usually imprint pretty strongly on their human carers so won’t run. When he gets larger he’ll become unmanageable and dangerous so he probably faces a life locked up in a small cage. Thankfully the Market for pet monkeys on this island is virtually non- existent so monkeys aren’t deliberately caught which means few have to face the fate of this poor little guy.
Dr Nancy Priston 
The problem with him running into forest later is that he will have lost his fear of humans, and would become a nuisance to locals because he would try to take their food etc. Its a sad situation if they don’t have the proper means to care for him as a pet and build the large enclosure he will eventually need.
Yes you’re right – in fact there have been a few cases of that happening. It’s extremely sad – poor little mite. I’m hoping to be able to raise funds to be able to do more education with the local people about situations like this so we can prevent it happening in future.