Woman Climbed into Monkey Enclosure to Give Them Hot Cheetos
Over the weekend, a woman hopped an enclosure fence at the El Paso Zoo, climbing into the facility's spider monkey display.
Zoo officials told ABC7 that the woman climbed into the enclosure and fed Flamin' Hot Cheetos to the zoo's monkeys Libby and Sunday.
The El Paso Zoo Director, Joe Montisano, said the unnamed woman is "Stupid and lucky."
Neither the woman or the monkeys were harmed in the incident.
Real Fit Fam El Paso on Instagram showed an individual standing behind a waterfall tossing the Cheetos to the spider monkeys.
"These are primates we're talking about. They could do some substantial damage to you," zookeeper Mason Kleist told ABC7. "They may be small monkeys, but they can take you to the ground if they wanted to."
The zoo said Libby and Sunday are on a specialized diet, so being fed human food could cause stomach problems and bowel disruptions for the two spider monkeys.
"Anything that we have they could get as well, so COVID is no different," Kleist told ABC 7. "We took the necessary steps to prevent them from getting that, so for someone to just go in there and give them food from their hands could just ruin that."
The zookeeper is very upset about the potential disruption of a relationship between the keepers and monkeys.
"It takes years to build trust with these animals, and for someone to come in there for five minutes for a video on Instagram or whatever just ruins years of work," he said. "It's going to take them time to get them back to where they were.
Read more at ABC7