Lebanese monkey caught, returned
No more monkey bouncing around northern Israel.
Tachtouch — as he turns out to be named — is home at last.
With the help of the United Nations, the wayward vervet monkey who ran wild in northern Israel for two weeks was returned to his home in Lebanon last week.
The monkey belongs to a nun named Beatrice Mauger. She had promised that there would be bananas handed out when he returned. But, apparently oblivious to Sister Beatrice’s urgent Facebook postings, Tachtouch declined to turn himself in. Instead, it took the expertise of three women from from the Yodfat Monkey Forest to lure him into a cage after they spent five days tracking him.
“I’m very proud to say that there was girl power in the field,” Nora Tavor, manager of the Monkey Forest in Yodfat, told Haaretz. “The monkey escaped from a nun, and it was us women who captured him, with patience, determination, faith, and love.”
Returning him “is an act of peace,” Tavor said. “Women making peace.”
That sentiment was shared back home in Lebanon.
“He took the drama out of the border by ignoring the wall and the barbed wire,” Sister Beatrice told AFP after being reunited with Tachtouch.
“This vervet is a peace messenger,” she said.
“Peace to all of Tachtouch’s fans who helped him to cross a sealed border, a prophetic sign of the reopening of the Israeli-Lebanese border,” she added.
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