Humans take back Thai city from monkeys

LOPBURI: Residents barricaded indoors, rival gang fights and no-go zones for humans. Welcome to Lopburi, an ancient Thai city overrun by monkeys super-charged on junk food, whose population is growing out of controlN

Pointing to the overhead netting covering her terrace, Kuljira Taechawattanawanna bemoans the monkey menace across the heart of the 13th-century city in the central province of the same name. “We live in a cage but the monkeys live outside,” she tells Agence France-Presse.

“Their excrement is everywhere, the smell is unbearable especially when it rainsN”

The fearless primates rule the streets around the Prang Sam Yod temple in the center of Lopburi, patrolling the tops of walls and brazenly ripping the rubber seals from car doors.

Their antics were largely tolerated as a major lure for the tourist hordes who descended on the city before the coronavirus outbreak to feed and snap selfies with the plucky animals.

But a government sterilization campaign is now being waged against the creatures after the epidemic provoked an unexpected change in their behaviorN

As foreign tourism—Thailand’s cash cow—seized up so did the flow of free bananas tossed their way, prodding the macaques to turn to violenceN Footage of hundreds of them brawling over food in the streets went viral on social media in March.

Their growing numbers—doubling in three years to 6,000— have made an uneasy coexistence with their human peers almost intolerable. Some areas of the city have simply been surrendered to the monkeys.

An abandoned cinema is the macaques’ headquarters — and cemetery. Dead monkeys are laid to rest by their peers in the projection room in the cinema’s rear and any human who enters is attacked.

Nearby, a shop owner displays stuffed tiger and crocodile toys to try to scare off the monkeys, who regularly snatch spray-paint cans from his store. No one in Lopburi seems to remember a time without the monkeys, with some speculating that the urban creep into nearby forest displaced the simians into the cityN