India tries birth control to curb monkey business
Primate pests bite, steal and vandalize
On a typical afterNEW DELHI noon in a posh neighborhood, a troop of rhesus macaque monkeys climbs the wall of an apartment building to rooftop water tanks with a specific goal.
The monkeys swing like circus performers until one of the water pipes snaps off, then they rush to drink the spraying water.
“It happens quite often,” homeowner Shakun Chandhok said. “They used to jump into the balcony and come into the kitchen and open the fridge, just like any human being does.”
The orange or gray monkeys, which weigh 12 to 17 pounds, are among the most dreaded pests in India, biting about 1,000 people a day nationwide and overrunning cities such as New Delhi. The monkey problem has become so overwhelming that officials are searching for ways to use birth control on the animals.
In the fruit-growing state of Himachal Pradesh, monkeys have increased more than fivefold in the past decade, according the government. The animals create up to $300 million in crop losses and diverted labor every year.
“Wherever they go, panic spreads,” said primatologist Iqbal Malik, who runs a non-profit group called Vatavaran, which is Hindi for “environment.”
“Residents warn each other to close all doors and windows,” Malik said. “Any houses which get raided by monkeys (are left) in shambles — eatables on the floor, crockery broken, taps open, wires cut, plants mauled.”
Himachal Pradesh formed a task force this month to cull the animals, which officials recently declared vermin. In the neighboring state of Uttarakhand, scientists at the Wildlife Institute of India will test an injectable contraceptive that has been used on
white-tailed deer and wild horses in the USA.
“What our simulation and modeling indicate is that we need to control reproduction by more than 70% of the adult female population for a very long time, eight to 10 years,” to seriously impact monkey populations, said Qamar Qureshi, a senior scientist at the Wildlife Institute involved with the injectable contraceptives program.
City and state governments have tried numerous methods to control the monkey troubles. Since the monkeys are associated with the Hindu god Hanuman, mass culling has never been attempted. Officials have tried surgical sterilization. They’ve also employed monkey trainers to bring in tame langurs — a larger, more dominant species — to scare off the macaques.
Delhi officials even hired people to impersonate langurs to keep rogue macaques out of parliament. The impersonators couldn’t keep them out of the building for long.
Himachal Pradesh spent about $1 million to set up eight sterilization centers. Officials pay trappers a bonus of nearly $10 a head for capturing the animals. Over the past 10 years, the state has sterilized more than 125,000 monkeys.
The cost and difficulty of sterilization has prompted persistent calls for trying oral contraceptives, but Qureshi said it’s difficult to ensure the female monkeys consume the correct dosage, and the drugs might hurt other species. “Using oral contraceptives is a far-fetched dream at present,” he said. “It’s very difficult to implement in the field. We’re not talking about zoo conditions, where you can feed monkeys in controlled conditions.”
Injections are more practical but also present challenges. A single dose lasts only one year, and after that, booster shots are necessary. At nearly $100 a dose, that’s too costly for widespread use in the USA, let alone in India.
Surgical sterilization is much cheaper, easier to monitor and permanent, said Mewa Singh, a primatologist at the University of Mysore. But catching and releasing the monkeys is costly.
Adding to the monkey problem in urban centers: People feed them at temples and parks, believing them to be holy.
“In South India, we’ve been monitoring the (macaque) population for the past 25 years,” Singh said. “The population has come down by 66%, but the complaint is the same: There are hundreds of thousands of monkeys, and they’re damaging the crops.”