Monkey see, monkey mess up your ‘do.
A former boxer is now recovering her nerves after an angry monkey attacked her and pulled her ponytail in an apparent protest over having its photo taken. A video of the Furious George’s dirty fighting tactics are currently going viral online.
“I was shaking like a leaf,” Carrianne Moylan told SWNS of the literal hair-raising incident, which occurred while she and her friends were visiting the Rock of Gibraltar in Gibraltar, UK.
The 45-year-old native of Birkenhead, UK, had encountered a Barbary Macaque — an endangered primate that’s the only macaque species found outside of Asia — sitting on a railing of a cliff. However, disaster struck after her friend urged Moylan to take a pic with it, whereupon the apparently camera-shy critter decided to strike.
“We didn’t see them jump on anyone so I was getting a little bit closer,” claimed Moylan, who owns a window and gutter cleaning company. “I was a bit scared because it looked like it was going to lunge so I moved away.”
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Her quick-thinking friend Jenny, 45, said she “had a feeling something was going to happen because of how hesitant Carrianne was, so I switched it to video instead of a picture.”
In the resultant clip, the fighter’s friends can be heard egging her on to “go closer” as the worst thing it will do is “stand on you.” However, Moylan declines and starts to move away as she claims the monkey is “not happy,” whereupon one of her friends jokes “I thought you were a boxer.”
Sure enough, when the ex-fighter turns and walks away, the incensed macaque runs along the railing and jumps on Moylan’s back. It then starts tugging on her blond ponytail, prompting her “sympathetic” friends to collapse into laughter.
“Get if off me now,” Moylan cries as Fighty Joe Young leaps off her back and flees the scene. The clip concludes with the Brit trying to fix her hair as her friends continue to poke fun at her over her interspecies hairstyling session.
“I just felt something on my back and panicked,” Moylan said, recounting the “unexpected” moment. “It screamed down my ear and pulled my ponytail out.”
“It mustn’t have wanted its photo taken,” quipped the gal, who now owns a window and gutter cleaning company. She reportedly used to be semi-professional boxer but had to retire after suffering an eye injuring two weeks before a British title fight.
Unfortunately, her training in the ring didn’t prevent her from freezing during the aforementioned animal attack. “I’ve been a boxer and a northern champion so I’m not easily scared by stuff, but my legs were shaking like it was my first fight,” Moylan recounted, describing why she didn’t just spank the monkey. “People say they’d have thrown it off their head, but I just reacted quickly. My hands were still in my pockets.”
In retrospect, the brawler has learned to see the humor in the bananas situation. “Everyone was hysterical, but I wasn’t. I saw the funny side in the end and had to fix my hair,” she said.
In a far less humorous monkey encounter over the summer, a troop of snow macaques attacked nearly 60 people in Japan, forcing Yamaguchi city to hire a special unit to deal with them.