Dairy-free cheese, please: Primates at Moncton zoo get pizza made by visitors

Rhythm Rathi · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 13, 2025 2:02 PM EDT | Last Updated: July 13

It appears monkeys and apes astatine Moncton's Magnetic Hill Zoo similar their pizzas with dairy-free cheese.

Members of the nationalist got to marque pizza for the primates connected Saturday arsenic portion of a programme to rise consciousness astir endangered primates and their habitats.

Barbara Bourque was visiting from Bathurst and decided to participate. It's not thing the nationalist gets to bash each day.

Bourque said she likes a donair pizza but was amazed to spot what the primates wanted. 

She made a naan pizza featuring herb sauce, dairy-free cheese, reddish peppers, spinach, oregano and ail powder. 

"I truly thought that they would nibble astatine them and conscionable propulsion them to the ground," she said. "I truly didn't person hopes that they would devour them, but they did emotion them."

Ring-tailed lemurs, lar gibbons, siamangs and Angolan colobus monkeys enjoyed the feast. "It was comical to ticker them," said Bourque.

The pizzas were fed to the primates by zookeepers. 

Hoot — a lar gibbon — didn't similar it erstwhile a 3rd serving was smaller than the archetypal two, dropping it to the crushed and staring down the zoo employee.

Another primate managed to get a large slice when it tugged the pizza container distant from the employee.

"The past monkeys that we saw, erstwhile they were finished and they walked distant with the pizzas, they were inactive picking done the obstruction astatine the reddish peppers that had fallen to the ground," said Bourque.

The acquisition facet of the programme helped radical larn astir thenar lipid products. Participants were taught to cheque if a merchandise was manufactured without harming primate habitats.

"I recognize that … they unrecorded a precise hard beingness retired successful nature, and erstwhile I spell market buying now, I'll decidedly beryllium looking for things that … volition not hinder their life," said Bourque. 

Chantal Fortin-Daigle, the zoo's visitors and acquisition co-ordinator, said the enactment is simply a mode to amended visitors astir endangered taxon done a amusive experience.

She said the primates get some funny and excited erstwhile the pizzas amusement up. Ingredients are screened by a dietitian and a nutritionist.

Fortin-Daigle said the animals astatine the zoo devour precise well. She couldn't accidental if primates would o.k. of pineapple connected their pizza.