Reporter

SALLY NEIGHBOUR

Series music

Music

Man with monkey

Neighbour:  School’s in at the agricultural monkey training college in Surat Thani, Thailand.

Music

Neighbour:  Another unwilling apprentice begins his life’s work in the coconut trade.

Music

Somphon with monkey

Neighbour:  Somphon Saekhow is the master monkey trainer of Thailand. Hundreds of young graduates have passed through his school.

Somphon:  Do it quickly, son and when we finish this, you can go home.

Neighbour:  They arrive wild from the jungle, and leave professionally trained coconut pickers.

Monkey

Somphon:  To change the monkeys’ behaviour so they’re not afraid of humans you have to be patient and kind. Kindness is the key.

Somphon with monkey

The monkeys are innocent. If we beat them, it’s a sin.

Neighbour:  How long have you been training monkeys, and how many monkeys have you trained?

Somphon:  I’ve been training monkeys for thirty years. This is my career.

Neighbour with Somphon

Somphon:  The coconut farms need monkeys so I train them. We produce thirty to forty graduates a year and each of them will work for fifteen years.

Neighbour:  After three to six months training, Somphon says one of his young charges can pick up to 500 coconuts a day.

Monkeys have become a feature of the local industry he says, hundreds of them at work in the plantations around Surat Thani.

But lately Somphon has switched his focus to a much more lucrative sideline — the tourist trade.

Music

Tourists with monkey

Neighbour:  Tourists now visit Somphon’s monkey school by the bus load every day. He earns more in a week now than he used to earn in months.

Somphon has become a star. He’s appeared in a TV ad, and knocked back movie offers. Word of the amazing talents of Somphon and his monkeys has spread far and wide.

With so many tourists to entertain, you’d wonder how Somphon finds the time to train monkeys for plantation work. Which got me thinking — maybe the whole thing was a ruse, invented for the tourists. Maybe there were no real coconut picking monkeys at all.

Somphon

Neighbour:  So maybe we can see some monkeys down here?

Neighbour:  So we set out to find them, and to answer the now nagging question, had Somphon made up the whole thing.

Somphon

Somphon: Bye bye...

Children

Neighbour:  But after an afternoon of searching, all suspicions were confirmed wrong.

Monkey climbing tree

In a plantation just outside Surat Thani, there they were, a real farmer and a real monkey, who, at our request, admittedly, proceeded to pick coconuts.

Neighbour:  And there wasn’t a tourist in sight.

Farmer:  Monkeys are better than men at this.  Usually each plantation has one or two monkeys and the monkeys take turns working. When one is tired, we use the other one.

Somphon with monkey

Neighbour:  At the end of a long day, Somphon and his favourite monkey — ‘son’ he calls him — sit back and reflect on their fortune and fame.

Somphon

Somphon:  You say that I’m famous but I owe it all to the monkeys. It’s the monkeys that are famous because of how they serve our community.  I want everyone to know how much they support the well-being of humans.

Series music

MONKEY BUSINESS CREDITS

Reporter  SALLY NEIGHBOUR

Camera    RON FOLEY

Sound     SCOTT TAYLOR

Editor    MARK GLEESON