Written by: Kristian E. Ziegler for the Daily Record
Last month, David Slater and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) finally settled their two-year legal battle over the intellectual property rights of a rare Indonesian crested macaque monkey named Naruto, who took pictures of himself in the wild with Slater’s camera.
The story began in 2011, when Slater traveled to the Tangkoko reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and spent several days following and photographing a troop of macaque monkeys. Slater has maintained that he coaxed the monkeys into pressing the shutter while looking into the lens, after he struggled to get them to keep their eyes open for a wide-angle close-up. Slater compiled Naruto’s famous toothy grin selfie shown here, which went viral back in 2011, and several other selfies in a book called Wildlife Personalities.
