Monkeys go bananas over cell phones

Many of us have had our cell phones taken, but never by a furry zoo resident.

The Daily Mail is reporting that a troop of squirrel monkeys at the London Zoo have had to be retrained after showing too much interest in cell phones. Evidently the monkeys, in a new "non-barrier enclosure," were attempting to snatch phones from visitors who held them out to take videos or photos, the story said.

Credit: London Zoo

Squirrel monkey

But phones aren't monkey business, so zookeepers put a sticky substance the monkeys don't like on old phones no longer in use. That trained them not to touch visitors' phones, the story said.

Daily Mail readers like Bob M. of Boston had their own fun monkeying around on the reader comments board: "Instead of re-training them, can we breed the phone-grabbing instinct into them, then deploy the monkeys on buses, subways, and in stores and theaters? Sounds like a good way to enforce cell phone etiquette to me."