10 Crazy Wrestling Scandals You've Never Heard Of

In a phenomenally cruel story, it was revealed in 2009 that a group of wrestlers from the Dragon Gate dojo had ritually physically abused a monkey kept as a pet mascot.

[Content warning: graphic description of animal abuse follows]:

While the official report broken by Mainichi Daily News only confirmed that the abuse "included" that the monkey was "burned with a lighter and sprayed with deodorant", it is also rumoured that it was scolded with boiling water and trapped in a box. Mercifully, the vlog footage has been scrubbed from the internet, but these acts were allegedly documented.

YO-HEY (RYOMA) was stupid enough to upload footage of the abuse online. This evidence of his sickening, reprehensible behaviour enabled justice to be served, at least; he was fired for his role in a systemic abuse case that spanned years, and the monkey was immediately re-homed. Dragon Gate President Takashi Okamura took a self-imposed pay cut as penance.

The extent to which wrestlers more known to the audience played a role (Shingo Takagi, Akira Tozawa) is debated. Shingo shaved his head as an act of contrition and had himself uploaded a vile blog post in which he forcibly restrained the monkey by the neck after - and how heartbreaking is this - it had attempted to escape. At the very least, Shingo used sickening, excessive force and bragged that he had done so. CIMA brought the monkey to the dojo, and while he wasn't (directly) implicated, as the monkey was under his care, he also shaved his head.

Matt Jackson wrote in the Young Bucks' autobiography Killing The Business that, while on a tour with the promotion, he noticed immediately that something was "off" with the monkey, of which he was terrified. The poor monkey, named Kora, would "scream loudly and throw rocks" at him and "angrily perform continuous backflips".