A 23-year-old man has been jailed for 12 months for stealing a rare monkey from Chessington World of Adventures.

Marlon Brown, of Bowater Close, Brixton, was found guilty of the theft of Spongebob at Kingston Crown Court last Friday.

Brown had denied stealing Spongebob but said he was with a group of around seven friends who broke into the monkey enclosure at Chessington on July 16 last year.

He told the court he had been "following the crowd" when he and his friends climbed over the gate into the zoo area of the park at around 5.30pm after spending the day on the rides.

Sentencing Brown this morning, Judge Richard Haworth described the theft as an "act of devilry".

The judge told Brown he had shown no remorse for his actions. He said: "This matter is so serious that only a custodial sentence will do. In the event the monkey was recovered but it was traumatised and still is traumatised."

Defence counsel Miss Macintosh told the court that Brown, who has no previous convictions, had been the victim of serious bullying at school.

She said: "He has been shunned by his family and feels a sense of shame of the embarrassment that he has brought to his family name."

According to Miss Macintosh, Brown studied on a pre-access course at Lambeth College after leaving school with few qualifications but left when he found the volume of written work too great because of his severe dyslexia. He then worked for a year at McDonald's before becoming a painter and decorator.

Sonia Freeman, head of mammals at Chessington Zoo, was delighted with the sentence. "It was exactly what we were hoping for. Hopefully this will go some way towards showing people that animals are not playthings and should be respected," she said.

Spongebob is a Bolivian Squirrel Monkey who was hand-reared in South Africa and arrived at Chessington in April 2006 as part of a breeding programme.

He was returned to Chessington World of Adventures after being found in a playground on the Notre Dame estate in Clapham three days after his theft, but was rejected by the rest of his troop and had to move. He is now at Battersea Park Zoo.

Spongebob even has his own blog, which you can read here.