Have you ever worried about whether the coconuts that find their way to your plate were harvested through the use of underpaid monkey labor?

Well, there's nothing to fear, because Animalplace.com is on the job!  Animalplace.com sent questionnaires to companies asking them to certify that their coconuts were not produced through the exploitation of monkeys.  Unfortunately, while some companies certified their coconuts as 100% free of "monkey business," some businesses, like Trader Joe's, didn't respond.  Could it be that Trader Joe's profits on the sweat and labor of chimpanzees who aren't properly compensated for their labor?

In some regions of the world, pig-tailed macaques are intentionally bred and trained – often with punishment – to harvest coconuts. The monkeys are always tethered to their “handler” and are not permitted to eat the coconuts they collect.

They are making monkeys do all the work collect the coconuts, but people get all the benefits!  How weird is that?  It's just like a tax system where some people labor to collect dollars, and other people get to spend them.

The very well-intentioned but also extremely nutty people at allamericanvegan.com provide further details of this simian exploitation:

... monkeys – native to coconut growing regions in Southeast Asia – are capable of harvesting several hundred more coconuts a day than a human can; reports vary widely has to how many coconuts a day one monkey can pick, ranging from 300 to 1,000. Picking coconuts is difficult, dangerous, labor intensive work, something younger generations of Indians are becoming increasingly unwilling to do.

They're doing jobs humans won't do.  Look at all the inhuman things monkeys are made to do:

... climbing tall trees over and over again during the course of a day, retrieving fallen coconuts from thick brush, retrieving coconut cutting tools for their handlers that include long, sharp blades, and loading hundreds of coconuts onto trucks which then transport them from picking location to picking location. ... It is, in a word, slavery.

Yes, monkeys are enslaved.  They are bred and kept like animals being exploited to serve people.  If you had never heard of a farm or ranch, could you imagine anything like that?

Perhaps, like dolphin-free tuna, there should be monkey-free coconuts.  Or perhaps the problem isn't simply that the monkeys are picking coconuts, but that they aren't being properly compensated for it.  But most countries where this is done do not have a minimum banana wage law, so monkeys can be exploited and paid peanuts.  Additionally, if the local monkey population isn't satisfactory, monkeys from other countries can be brought in to do the jobs that local monkeys won't do.

Monkeys should be paid a living wage.  There should also be a certification process so that we know that coconuts were harvested by organic and free-range monkeys.  Also, gay and lesbian monkeys should be given the same benefits as the other monkeys, and transgendered female monkeys should be caged together with the other female monkeys.

By the way, for any reader who doesn't quite get it, this is satire.  These are animals.  Like cows, pigs, chickens, and many others, they exist to serve us.

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.