Tunda?s whole family was slaughtered when he was just an infant; poachers tracked his group by listening to their morning calls of the wild and swooped in for the kill.

Only he was taken; the others were too old, too strong, too unpredictable and too wild. The poachers knew they wouldn?t have let them take him, so they killed his family...
Only the youngest of gibbons are ever taken from the jungles, as these are the only ones that can be trained.

Whether as pets, or performing in zoos or along Bangla road, many of Phuket?s performing apes start life out with the same horrendous jolt.

Suwit ?Tum? Punnadee has been the Project Director of the Phuket Gibbon Rehabilitation Project (GRP) for ten years and said, ?Gibbons and monkeys are taken when they are very young for two reasons: firstly they are very cute and secondly very easy to train.?

Stripped from the natural spoils of living in a gibbon community, when they reach sexual maturity at about 6-7 years old, many gibbons kept in captivity become frustrated, grow large canine teeth and become extremely aggressive.

It is then that their ?career? riding bicycles, dunking basketballs or having their photograph taken with tourists typically comes to an end.

Khun Tum said, ?We receive many retired performers, but we also get lots of requests from owners who just can?t take care of them anymore.?

Up until 2005, it was legal to own a monkey or gibbon in Thailand, as long as you had the right permit. This has, thankfully, all changed now.

Phuket zoos, and places that stage monkey shows however can still be granted such paperwork and so are therefore operating - legally speaking - completely above board.
Although officially permitted, Ashley Fruno, Senior Campaigner for PETA Asia has little doubt of the irrevocable damage that is being caused to performing monkeys in zoos all over the world.

?Primates forced to perform have no control over any aspect of their lives. Handlers dictate their eating and sleeping schedules, and they aren´t allowed to engage any natural behaviors, such as socialising, roaming, and foraging. Many become listless, sick, and depressed. They are often trained with violent methods and are abused when they refuse to perform.

?What is a few fleeting moments of distraction for visitors means a lifetime of misery for the animals,? Mr Fruno said.

However at least for the immediate future, the situation is unlikely to change, as Khun Thum believes not enough people actually want it to: ?Phuket Zoo and other places like that have permits and bring lots of money into Thailand, as this is what tourists actually want to see. It?s a difficult situation.?

He also said that he was more concerned as to where such places were actually getting their gibbons and monkeys from, ?They always use young gibbons in the shows, and so they will have definitely been forcibly taken from their mother. Also, what happens when they get older??

Working gibbons and monkeys do not have a pension plan, so the lucky ones, the ones who manage to survive are the ones that somehow manage to find their way to the GPR and to where the rehabilitation programme begins.

?When the animals first come, they are given a physical examination for herpes, hepatitis A + B and tuberculosis. If the animals pass the medical, then they are admitted to the centre with the ultimate aim of rehabilitating them so they may be released back into the jungle.

?It?s important for them to have good eyes for example, so that they may forage when they get back to the wild,? K. Tum added.

He explained that with the older retiree gibbons, this unfortunately was quite rare as often they had become withdrawn and were just not used to interacting with other primates.
?Some gibbons and monkeys have never seen members of their own species before so don?t know how to really act with each other. So if they pass the physical, we then start the socialisation process.?

Gibbons of a similar age and size are then placed in cages together with the ultimate aim of, perhaps for the first time since they were snatched from birth, being part of a family again.

?Often when they see their first gibbon they become excited or scared. They have no experience of being with other primates or grooming each other for example. So we put them in cages to see if they can eat, sing or play together.

?They also go through a type of detox process - where we only give them fruit - as often they are only used to eating bad unhealthy human food,? explained K. Tum.

For those that take well with other gibbons, they, along with the members of their new family, are transferred to the GPR?s tourist site at the Bang Pae waterfall and it is there where the second stage of rehabilitation begins.

There, although still kept in cages, the enclosures are much larger and tend to be built around the trunk of trees, allowing the gibbons to climb and forage for themselves.

If the gibbons show positive progress, they are released. ?We have reintroduced around 22 gibbons into the forest, and now about 5 different families live there. We are very happy because 30 years ago, the whole forest was completely empty, but now for the first in a long time there are second generation wild gibbons being born.?

Unfortunately, sometimes setting up ?home? does not always work out and when released at Bang Pae waterfall, a monkey pairing?s new start can end quite badly. Khao ? a male gibbon that ?worked? the bars in Phuket and Nuan ? a former pet from Phang Nga who was given up when she bit her owner?s daughter had baby Puya together in 2001 and were all later released in 2007. A year later though, male gibbon Khao disappeared and Nuan was found with a broken arm and brought back to the rehabilitation centre.

She was then paired with Max and in 2010, Maesa was born. Unfortunately though, mother and child did not bond and Nuan abandoned Maesa, refusing to pick her up and instead often left her hanging off the cage or on the floor.

Such behaviour is unfortunately quite common, especially with those who have themselves had traumatic upbringings. Mr Fruno said that treating a primate in any other way than a primate can have extremely negative consequences, ?You don´t need tests to see that captivity literally drives primates insane. A walk through any zoo or entertainment park can reveal primates exhibiting abnormal, repetitive behavior like circling, pacing, or bar biting, due to stress, abuse, loneliness and deprivation of senses. Many even resort to self-mutilation like biting themselves or tearing out their own fur out of frustration."

To prevent any harm coming to Maesa, she was taken from the family cage after just a month with the ultimate aim of pairing her with other young gibbons, but again her life was to take a turn for the worse, as she now spends her days in her cage alone, because her peers have refused to accept her into their community.

?This sometimes happens,? said K. Tum, ?but she?s still very young and has been through a lot. She also has plenty of time to be accepted into a gibbon community.?

Feeling lonely or learning how to be a primate is not a problem, at least for the majority of the Long Tail Macaque monkeys of Lopburi.

In the city of Lopburi, in the north of Thailand, far from being forced to ape human ways to survive, monkeys are accepted or at the least tolerated, as locals recognise the important contributions they make to the local economy.

The Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand (WARF), of which the GRP is just one of its projects, also has a scheme in Lopburi in which K. Tum spent some of his working life.
?Monkeys have lived there for many generations, and monkeys and humans live side by side. Although there are attempts at controlling the population growth, nobody has ever studied the exact numbers, but there must be at least a few thousand.?

A walk through Lopburi is sure to conjure up scenes from Hollywood movies Gremlins and more recently the Rise of the Planet of the Apes?

One side of the street resembles pretty much every other small Thai town, with rows of shop houses and street stalls. Businesses and shops on the other side of the street however, have remained vacant and derelict of humans for a long time and are now occupied and are solely the domain of the monkeys.

This situation is very much a working relationship between the monkeys and non-monkeys and very rarely spills over into trouble.

?The people are used to dealing with the monkeys,? K. Tum said, ?The monkeys only get aggressive when they do not have food, then they go and perhaps ransack a house or property to get it. They?re used to humans and so are not scared of them.?

The project?s main duties are therefore to go to catch a particularly troublesome monkey and also go and help the injured ones.

The situation in Phuket is very different from Lopburi and while few would advocate the free-for-all that is Lopburi city, modern day public perceptions of zoos and cruel use of animals have changed quite dramatically in the last few decades, but according to K. Tum, it still needs to change some more, especially in Thailand.

?Most Thai people I think have a very caring and loving attitude to animals [owing to Buddhist tenants] but there are, like anywhere, bad people who use monkeys for a business.

?We try to stop it and raise awareness, but still we get baby gibbons who come here that mean their families will have been killed, which mean the poaching practice continues. But it?s also the tourist?s job not to solicit that type of behaviour.?

Following psychological tests in the 1970s, founded in psycholinguistic theories, species of apes were found to have the capacity to communicate with not only one another but also humans through learned sign language.

So, although scenes from Rise of the Planet of the Apes are still pretty fantastical, one does wonder what a liberated and free Lopburi Long tailed Macaque, a Phuket gibbon pet and a Samui plantation-working monkey would have to say to each other if they ever got together and what exactly their opinion of humans would be.

Mr Fruno is rather pessimistic of the slant the potential conversation could take, ?If your last memory of your mother was her violent death at the hands of a human being, it´d be safe to say your thoughts regarding the species wouldn´t be too kind.?

Whether it is the chaotic and lawless existence of the Lopburi primates, the slave-like living of the coconut-picking monkeys in Samui or the drugged, domesticated doped up and confused existence of the Phuket gibbon, the way Thailand treats its primates needs to change.

It seems that Thai people and its tourists want Thailand?s apes, chimps and monkeys to act more and more human, and bemoan them when they act anything other than.

We wonder why they attack, why they steal from humans or become anti-social, and exhibit signs of mental distress. We wonder why they respond like we would do, despite us forcing them to do exactly that.