Monkey Matters- Femina

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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.

Stop The Atrocities
Macaques are a favourite laboratory test animal. The Rhesus macaques are in danger because they are caught in large numbers and used in laboratory tests. Scientists and students of science conduct all kinds of cruel and painful experiments on these monkeys just to see how they react to medicines and chemicals. Some of these experiments are made as part of application for scholarships! Tests on the Rhesus macaque resulted in the discovery of the Rh (rhesus) factor in 1940. This is a hereditary blood antigen.

When Rh and non-Rh blood are mixed during blood transfusions, fatal reactions can occur. The crab-eating macaque was the clinical test animal for the development of the polio vaccine. There are two to three million crab-eating macaques in the wild, but even they are threatened by habitat loss and persecution by humans. Others are fewer in number and more seriously threatened. The most seriously threatened and rarest is the lion-tailed macaque. This creature is black-faced, long snouted, golden maned, golden tailed and red-eyed.

What You Can Do
Protect these poor beings as they not only help in the dispersal of seeds but also are very important in biodiversity cycles. Just give these primates the space they need. Only a close link between nature conservation and sustainable development will ensure healthy primate numbers in the future.
Stop watching monkey-dances
Start writing letters against pollution, the hydro-electrical projects in national parks and illegal logging
We will be able to save the macaque family if we all join hands in allowing these animals to live in peace.
For more information and to know how you can participate in saving Macaques, write to:
Nature's Beckon,
Ward No.1, Datta Bari,
Dhubri - 783301 Assam.
Tel: 03662 31067
Or write to Mr Sudipto Chatterjee at WWF India bhcp@wwfindia.net or call on 011 24621123

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