My Monkey Baby!

Had enough with those ‘human’ daughters? Get yourself a pretty princess ‘monkey baby’! Britain’s Channel4 is currently airing a documentary entitled My Monkey Baby that chronicles the bond between Lori and Jim Johnson – an American couple – and their Capuchin monkey Jessica Marie. “If I hear anyone call her a monkey I throw a fit,” says ‘dad’ Jim, “She’s my daughter, 100%”.

The petite primate is treated not unlike a princess… has her own bedroom, sits at the dinner table for meals and has oodles of outfits. In the clip available of the film, Jessica is shown in a frilly pink dress getting lipstick in a bright shade of red applied to her lips while ‘Mom’ utters in baby speak, “now you look so purdy!” ‘Mom’ said, when commenting on being a ‘parent’ to a ‘monkid’, that “she was going to be a baby I was going to have forever.”

Lori already had two human daughters – who are both grown adults- but apparently she yearned for some sort of arrested development in an offspring. She opted to harness all her motherly instincts in raising a monkey that has a lifespan of forty years. Would you want to raise an “eternal toddler” for that long? Can a monkey, or any other animal, be a ‘child substitute’?

Check out a clip of the show here.