Orangutan in Viral TikTok Puts on Human's Dropped Sunglasses Before Chucking Them Out of Enclosure
Courtesy of minorcrimes / TikTok
An orangutan is the latest viral TikTok star after she was captured on video just trying to look nice.
Tiktok user @minorcrimes (name: Lola Testu) posted the video—which has over 30.2 million views as of this writing—with the caption "So I'm down a pair of sunglasses but up a very good story."
That story involves the sunglasses falling into the orangutan enclosure at an Indonesian zoo. The orangutan approaches the glasses, baby in tow, and picks them up. At first, Testu is afraid the orangutan will try and eat the glasses, but she needn't have worried: Science tells us that humans and orangutans are incredibly similar, and that clearly includes fashion sense. The orangutan slides the glasses onto her face and is immediately ready to Sissy That Walk.
The video transitions to a different angle and we see the orangutan has made the bold stylistic decision to wear the sunglasses upside down. High fashion is not a game everyone can play, but she manages to make it work. She briefly takes the glasses off and tries them with the ear pieces pointing outward, but decides that's a step too far, and returns them to their standard, forward facing position. Then we see her baby make a few thwarted attempts to take the sunglasses from her because if there's one thing babies from all species have in common, it's that they can't just let you have this to yourself.
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Finally, the video ends with the way all fashion trends are doomed to: The orangutan pulls the glasses from her face, thinks, "Wait a minute, these are last season!" and impressively flings them toward the wall of the enclosure, never to be seen again.
All in all, this encounter was safe and resulted in an entertaining video. However, it always bares repeating that intentionally dropping or throwing items into zoo enclosures can be harmful to the animals in a myriad of ways and should be avoided. Zoos can be stressful enough for animals even in the best of times—research has shown that animals can differentiate between familiar (zookeepers) and unfamiliar (visitors) humans and that large numbers of the latter cause increased stress and alert responses.
So please, don't drop or throw anything into zoo enclosures. You might hurt an animal. Or they might start throwing back.
