This kitten, now named Monkey, was found inside the Japanese snow macaque enclosure at Wildlife Discovery Park on Thursday morning. (Discovery Wildlife Park)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

should've been a goner

Kitten lives after night in macaque enclosure at Discovery Wildlife Park

Jun 28, 2019 | 3:22 PM

Cats are said to have nine lives and one in central Alberta is proving that in a whole new way.

Doug Bos, owner of Wildlife Discovery Park, says if you’d asked him what would happen to a kitten put into an enclosure with four Japanese snow macaques, he’d bet it wouldn’t last too long.

Thursday morning, the staff at the park near Innisfail found just that, except the kitten, which wasn’t in the best physical shape, had been taken into the shelter by the primates.

“It was a huge surprise on so many different levels. The first question was where did this cat from to begin with? We can only assume someone was in the park the day prior and dropped it off, because we’re a long ways away from any residential area,” Bos says.

“Even to get into the monkey house, there’s a flap door the monkeys have to open and close, so my guess is they picked it up and took it into the house. It was a cold night, so they nurtured it and babied it.”

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(Discovery Wildlife Park)

Bos says they’ve seen gophers in the enclosure be mutilated, which is just something normal for the macaques to do.

Even more amazingly, the cat would have had to squeeze through a two-inch space in the chain-link fencing to get into the enclosure, and it may have had to avoid wild foxes known to be in the vicinity.

In recent years, Discovery Wildlife Park has had both a cougar kitten and lynx dropped on their doorstep.

The kitten, now named Monkey, according to a post on Facebook, has been adopted by one of the zookeepers.

“We haven’t had (macaque) babies for quite a while, so maybe if we had left it in there, and it was big enough to eat solids, they would’ve kept it and raised it,” Bos wonders. “It could’ve survived on the monkey chow, but we didn’t want to take that chance.”

Safe to say this cat has just eight lives left.