Usually, zoo employees do not advise to come close to the cages where our closest relatives from the animal world sit. A monkey can easily pull off your scarf, pull off your glasses, smudge your lipstick or scratch. Attacks of aggression in these cute-looking animals are not uncommon. Therefore, at the Colchester Zoo, monkeys sit in an enclosure, separated from visitors by a solid transparent wall: this way you can look closely at the primates without putting yourself in danger.
A young couple once went to this zoo: 20-year-old Kylie Bettany and her husband Kiran. Kylie was then in her last month of pregnancy. She did not even think that she herself would become the subject of close attention for animals. It turns out that while she was examining the orangutans, they were examining her. And one of the inhabitants of the aviary, a male named Raja, got close to the glass and began to examine Kylie’s belly.
“Look, he’s trying to play with you,” Kylie’s husband started filming what was happening on camera, and the woman decided to play along with the monkey and lifted her jacket, showing the orangutan a bare belly.
What the beast did after that moved 17 million people who watched the video. First, Raja stroked Kylie’s stomach through the glass. Then he put his ear to it, as if trying to hear the heartbeat of an unborn child. And then he started kissing him at all!
“We didn’t think he would react that way,” the worried parents said later. – Raja even had tears in her eyes. It was just amazing. “