IN MARCH 2013, despite warnings from multiple people in his crew, Justin Bieber decided to bring his pet monkey O.G. Mally to Germany while he was on tour.
Speaking to GQ magazine in 2016, the singer said:
Honestly, everyone told me not to bring the monkey. Everybody. Everyone told me not to bring the monkey. I was like ‘It’s gonna be fine, guys!” It was the farthest thing from fine.
Bieber had received the monkey as an unexpected birthday gift and it was seized at customs and placed under quarantine shortly after the singer arrived in Germany.
The singer had until May that year to produce paperwork to retrieve his monkey, but he failed to do so and it was passed over to a zoo in Hodenhagen.
However, it has been revealed that the Capuchin monkey is still struggling to integrate into the zoo after five years.
A spokesperson from the zoo said “He still has issues speaking the Capuchin language. He still tries to imitate human speech. He sometimes makes weird scratchy sounds which are not typical for Capuchins. That’s why we think he still tries to talk to humans.”
A specialist from the zoo recalled that the monkey was extremely frightened and disoriented when it arrived.
It took a while for him to get there because he was taken away from his mother and natural family way too early. He did not learn to be a monkey.
The staff of the Serengeti Zoo in Hodenhagen told Babe (the website, not the little piglet who hangs around with monkeys) that they believe Mally was probably purchased illegally on the black market.
Just this week, Chris Brown also had a Capuchin monkey seized from him in California.
Brown posted an Instagram video of his 3-year-old daughter cuddling the monkey, which prompted a half-dozen calls from concerned viewers. Agents arrived to Chris Brown’s home with a search warrant and staff working in his home handed over the monkey in a cage.
The monkey, named Fiji, is now at an undisclosed facility. Chris Brown could be facing a six-month jail sentence for possessing the monkey.