Of that monkey motion

Monday 2nd August, 2021

A government MP has submitted a private member’s motion seeking parliamentary approval for capturing and sterilising monkeys. He wants these animals relocated to vegetated islands in reservoirs, etc., thereafter. Monkeys cause considerable crop damage, and farmers are desperate to hold them at bay. Various methods have been employed over the years to prevent troops of monkeys from invading villages, and even terrorising people, especially women and children. So, the government MP concerned may have been prompted to come up with the aforesaid plan to solve the problem in response to requests from his constituents, but he does not seem to have obtained expert opinion on the issue.

How to catch so many monkeys has not been specified in the motion, the full text of which we published on Saturday, and it will be an intractable problem unless the government assigns the task to the idling local government members, who are too numerous to be counted.

The motion at issue reminds us of a proposal made by a deputy minister in the yahapalana government. He wanted an open season declared on wild pigs and monkeys, and some of the wild elephants shipped to other countries as gifts. He said the populations of some wild animals had increased exponentially, causing problems to humans, and culling was the solution. The wild boar could be killed and sold for meat, he maintained. His proposal struck a responsive chord with some of the people troubled by wild animals, but drew a lot of criticism from others, especially animal rights activists. He chose to ignore the root cause of the problem—the huge increase in the human population, which has led to the opening up of the natural habitats of animals for cultivation and development purposes. It is not only humans who need lebensraum, or the territory needed for their natural development; animals also do. When space, food and water become scarce, animals invade villages.

The main reason for the human-elephant conflict is that many villages and farmlands have sprung up, unplanned, in the middle of animal territories, causing the depletion of forest cover, and in some cases, even blocking elephant corridors. The methods being used at present to tackle the conflict are outdated, and remedial action proposed by experts such as Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando has gone unheeded. Successive governments have been only throwing money at the problem, as we reported on 22 July.

There are other reasons for wild animal invasions. Dr. Nishan Sakalasooriya of the University of Kelaniya has, in a research paper presented at an international conference in 2019, pointed out that the prolonged neglect of forest tanks or kuluwew built for special purposes such as storing rainwater, enriching groundwater level, providing water for wild animals, maintaining the food chain, etc., has caused the problem of wild elephants, monkeys, porcupines, giant squirrels and wild boar invading village ecosystems and threatening the settlers in an unprecedented manner. Insects, rats and snakes also enter residential and farming areas as a result, he has said, concluding that if the kuluwew are renovated systematically and forest ecosystems restored, the wild animal threat can be reduced by about 80 percent. This is something President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who has evinced a keen interest in rural development, should give serious thought to.

Meanwhile, it may not be too cynical a view that perhaps the SLPP politicians will not have to run around sterilising monkeys unless their supporters who are encroaching on forest lands apace are reined in; at the rate forest clearance is being carried out, the day may not be far off when we are left with no trees and no wild animals.

As for the aforesaid private member’s motion, a wag says he does not think the translocation of monkeys to islands in reservoirs or rivers will be a solution, if experience is anything to go by; the aggressive anthropoids we send to an ait in a lake near the Colombo city every five years or so do not cease to be a nuisance. They, in fact, become a bigger problem after being sent there, and destroy forests, etc. These troublesome creatures in kapati suit are far more invasive and destructive than the brachiating primates that only seek to satisfy their needs and not unlimited wants. If the main remedy that the monkey motion proposes—sterilisation—had been adopted in dealing with the anthropoids that people sent to the lake isle close to Colombo years ago, the country would have been free from trouble currently being caused by their descendants.

One only hopes the motion in question will prompt the government to ponder the problems that wild animals cause to humans, and vice versa, and enlist the support of experts to solve them, without further delay.