A lighter story to end the week. In a zoo outside Tokyo, one monkey has pulled heartstrings around the world after forming an unexpected friendship.

Stephanie Sy has the story.

It's a story of rejection, vulnerability, and the animal instinct for companionship.

It helps that the central character is an unbearably cute monkey, a seven-month-old

macaque in Japan's Ichikawa City Zoo named Punch. Abandoned by his own mother shortly after birth,

zookeepers handed Punch a stuffed animal. Never mind that the orangutan is a different species,

he's hardly let go of it since.

This soft toy has quite long fur and several easy places to hold, and it looks like a monkey.

We thought that it looking like a monkey might help punch integrate back into the troop later on.

Watch as baby punch is dragged around like a chew toy,

escaping to the comfort of his protector,

using him for cover.

Videos like these have sparked an outpouring of love

and sympathy from the more evolved primates among us.

Nobody wants to be his friend.

But he has plenty of friends on TikTok.

Hashtag, hang in there, punch, has gone viral.

The spectacle has drawn massive crowds to the zoo, and there's a run on the stuffed animal

at IKEA.

He's become such an idol-like figure already, so I hope he stays lively and continues being an idol.

It's not by any means a replacement for a mother and it's not going to give the animal the attachment that it sort of needs in order to develop.

But it does give sort of an avenue to retreat to that might in the moment reduce those stress responses a little bit,

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