Animal rights activists have maintained their pressure on the Thai government to ban the use of monkeys for picking coconuts after footage was captured showing the animals chained and beaten.

Investigators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) claim they saw endangered monkeys ‘chained tightly by the neck’ and kept tethered in ‘often flooded, trash-filled areas with little shelter from the elements’.

Supermarkets around the world have stopped using coconut milk from major Thai producer Chaokoh after an investigation in 2021 showed the appalling conditions that the primates were forced to work in while harvesting coconuts.

In a follow-up investigation, PETA claims that Thai government has failed to tackle the animal abuse and that ‘monkeys are still being illegally obtained, chained, and forced to pick coconuts for suppliers linked to dozens of top coconut milk brands’.

They say the undercover videos taken between December 2021 and June 2022 ‘implicates coconut pickers, brokers, farms, and monkey-training schools in nine provinces’.

PETA Senior Vice President Jason Baker said: ‘Kind people want to know why social and sensitive monkeys are still being forced to labor in the abusive coconut industry.

‘PETA is calling for a worldwide boycott of Thai coconut products until local officials back up their empty words with action, including by shutting down monkey-training schools and subsidizing shorter trees.’

Monkeys - either illegally capture or raised in captivity - have been used to harvest coconuts from tall trees for decades in Thailand. They labour is cheaper and quicker than using humans or machines but subjects the animals to a lifetime of suffering.

PETA said that once the monkeys are too old to work, they are often released back into the wild without the necessary survival skills.