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Don't Take A Selfie With An Orangutan, Or You Might Get Slapped

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A group of guys are riding in a boat down a river when an orangutan jumped in. No, seriously, you can see the encounter between the two cultures, guys and orangutan, on YouTube, where it's been posted by a user named RailGod. The young men are on a boat with guides, traveling down a river in the Borneo Jungle.

We came across a wild orangutan hanging over the river on our way to Camp Leakey who joined us in the boat, wrote RailGod. The orangutan looks at ease in the video - his jungle, after all. The guys hold out some small snacks. And the orangutan takes them in his hands to eat them.

But then one of the men begins to pose for a selfie with the orangutan. And the great ape slaps him not hard but emphatically. As you can hear, the man on the video says, he just slapped me, like, right on the nose. Orangutans share about 97 percent of the same DNA as human beings. The 3 percent we don't share is the nerve the orangutan had to do what a lot of people just dream about. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.