His Mother Rejected Him, and a Stuffed Toy Became His Only Comfort. Now Punch the Monkey Is the One Looking After a Baby

Punch was born at Ichikawa City Zoo, near Tokyo, on July 26, 2025, in the middle of a brutal summer heat wave.

His mother was young and exhausted, and she did not take care of him. So the zookeepers stepped in and raised the tiny Japanese macaque by hand.

Baby macaques spend their first months clinging to their mothers. Punch had no one to cling to. So the keepers gave him a big, soft orange orangutan toy from IKEA. It helped him build the strength to hold on, and it gave him something to hug.

He took it everywhere. He dragged it across the rocks, curled up on it to sleep and held it tight whenever he was scared.

In February 2026, the zoo shared photos of the little monkey and his oversized toy, and people all over the world fell in love with him. As keepers slowly introduced him to the rest of the troop, his first attempts to fit in did not go well. Some of the other monkeys ignored him, and some pushed him away. Fans online cheered him on with the hashtag #HangInTherePunch.

Little by little, it worked. Punch began spending time with the adult monkeys. They groomed him, and he made friends. When he turned one in July, he received more than 2,500 birthday cards from fans.

Then, on November 8, 2026, the zoo shared new footage of him.

In it, Punch, now about 15 months old, stays close to a smaller baby monkey from his troop. He watches over it, plays with it gently and grooms its head. The little one is not his baby. But the monkey who once had no one to hold on to is now looking out for someone even smaller than himself.

The zoo was quick to give the credit to the people who never gave up on him. “Punch is able to live so healthily thanks to the care our keepers provide,” the zoo wrote. “Please show your support for them, too.”

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Photos: Daiei Onoguchi / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Punch with his plush at Ichikawa City Zoo, March 2026).