Welcome to this week’s Society Diary. It’s a zootropic special this week, featuring a monkey and, er, a sock. And of course, animal charities in abundance.
So for years, there’s been a legal wrangle over who owns the photograph of a crested black macaque, which was taken by photographer David Slater on a visit to Indonesia. Or at least, taken on his camera. The problem, you see, is that the monkey pressed the button.
This has proven to be a key issue for the charity sector – more than you’d think a picture of a monkey should be, if Diary’s honest. First, the Wikimedia Foundation refused to acknowledge the bloke’s copyright. And then Peta sued him, claiming that the copyright belonged to the monkey.
Slater claims, incidentally, that Peta was not actually suing him on behalf of the right monkey.
They’re suing him on behalf of Naruto, a male monkey, while the monkey in question is apparently female. Slater argues, persuasively, that if he’s going to get sued by a monkey, it should at least be the right monkey.
Diary, if we’re honest, thinks the whole thing is a pile of macacque.
Anyway, the news this week is that Peta have got a win out of it. The trial’s been settled out of court, and a quarter of all cash made from the sale of the monkey selfie will go to charity.
Diary’s also mildly interested in the fact that this is not even the most famous trial ever to be named after a monkey. That honour would go to the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a substitute biology teacher was convicted of teaching the unproven theory of evolution. That case also involved a charity, the American Civil Liberties Union, although that time the charity was defending the poor sod on the stand, rather than having put him there.
Look out for the sock
Anyway, enough of endangered monkeys. Now a story about an endangered sock.
Basically, the RSPCA was called out to rescue a terrified family from what turned out to be nothing more dangerous than a dirty sock (these of course can be pretty harmful – but saving humans from their own untidiness is hardly in the RSPCA’s charitable objectives).
Parents of small children will be familiar with protecting their offspring from monsters under the bed, but in this case the whole family believed the protruding pink sock to be an escaped lizard.
Animal Collection Officer, Vic Hurr, attended the scene and describe the potentially dangerous creature as, “around seven inches long and about two inches wide” which was “protruding from the edge of the bed and it wasn’t moving at all”.
Upon closer inspection she realised it was simply a pink stripy sock and provided the young girl whose bedroom it was with the sage advice that she should tidy her room.
