Monkey Matters- Femina

Monkey Matters

Intrepid young environmentalist Sahir Doshi takes you through India, telling you all about macaques and the injustice being meted out to them

YOU'VE probably seen them running across the road, eating wafers from packets stolen from roadside shops or prancing around mischievously. Though you may pass them off as 'just another monkey', they are most likely macaques. Often, these are caught young and their mothers are killed in their attempts to foil the capture. The baby monkeys' noses are hooked and they are then tortured into learn dancing to the 'damru' or 'dholak' and perform pranks.

With wastelands and agricultural lands shrinking, the macaques, being mostly leaf eaters, have slowly made their way into gardens and wooded residential areas and have started picking on food thrown away by people. Mushrooming apartments and houses along the city's periphery have robbed the monkeys of their habitat, forcing them to scavenge for food in the city.

Know Your Macaque
Macaques are generally considered terrestrial although they like to sleep up in trees. They are more active in the early morning and late afternoon - when it's cool. Males are bigger and heavier than females, have well-developed canines and are not as colourful as other monkeys. Macaques eat mainly fruit; but now they eat whatever is available - flowers, insects, eggs and perhaps some meat. Crab-eating macaques hunt crabs and eat any other marine life they can catch. To complement their varied diets, macaques have simple stomachs.

They also have well-developed cheek pouches, some are so large and extend down the neck that the pouches can contain the same amount of food as their stomachs! Macaques are stoutly built with strong limbs. They are dexterous with fully opposable thumbs. They move on all fours. Some have virtually no tails (lion-tailed macaque, Barbary ape), while others have long tails.

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