Monkey management in the urban jungle

You can see packs of wild monkeys marauding the forested hills of Kowloon and the New Territories, swinging and leaping through trees. They run around on reservoir service roads like ragged gangs of street urchins with dirty, urban-grey coats. They mark their territory with parcour skills any human practitioner could only dream of.

    I found them sheltering under tree leaves on a rainy afternoon, mothers picking fleas out of babies’ coats, juveniles shaking branches to pass the time, and fat patriarchs lazily slumped in branch nodes. They watched us, but left us unmolested.

    Their movements, their gaze, their fingers are all an uncanny reminder of ourselves. Like wild tribes of small hairy people, looking quizzically at us, unafraid, because they are used to us.

    Their dexterity is uncanny. They grab, prise, poke and pinch with gnarled fingers. Their short legs double as an extra pair of arms, the tail a fifth limb. Their faces are old, with deep wrinkles, giving a different meaning to the term old-world monkey used by zoologists to differentiate from American, or new-world, primates. But their large, intelligent eyes are young and bright. The babies and toddlers induce gushing empathy from people, they remind us of our own children.

    They are macaques, wild monkeys with a long history of interaction with humans. The species here are the rhesus, dominant with about two-thirds of the population, the others mostly being a hybrid of rhesus and long-tail macaques, also known as crab-eating macaques.

    The experts tell us that we're not looking at an indigenous population, despite records of passing naturalists in the 19th century who reported monkeys on all the islands that dot the territory. Deforestation during that century would have hit the original inhabitants hard, as would a rising human population uninhibited by hunting laws.

    The ancestors of the rhesus macaques were introduced to the woods surrounding the new Kowloon reservoir around the time of the first World War. Their task was to eat the poison-laced leaves of a plant that threatened to contaminate the city's drinking water.  

     

Source: Botanical.com

The strychnos is a formidable plant that exists around the world’s tropical belt and used by some Amazonian Indians for poison arrow tips. The synthesised version of the toxin, strychnine, has a long history as a tool of assassins and murderers, and was a particular favourite in the imagination of British crime writer Agatha Christie. The substance is notorious for delivering an agonising death by prolonged convulsions and violent muscle spasms. But macaques, though they are amongst our closest relatives, thrive on the leaves of the strychnos, so they got the job to patrol the reservoir and stayed ever since.

    The long-tails came after the second World War, originally with a passing circus troop, the story goes. The travelling show failed to get permission to take their monkeys to the next destination and they were forced to leave the macaques behind. These south-east Asian primates survived alongside the rhesus, and the two species went on to interbreed.

    Going by geographical spread, the rhesus macaques are the most successful monkey species in the world. Their natural range stretches from Afghanistan in the west to south east Asia, with close relatives such as the long-tails dotted all round the periphery. Japanese macaques live all through Honshu island, and are known to survive in the most northerly latitudes of all wild primates, famously getting by in winter by keeping warm in hot spring baths.

    In Hong Kong they are mostly based around Kamshan in Kowloon, as well as Lion Rock and Shing Mun country parks. The species is notably missing on Hong Kong island itself, though past records show previous populations.

    Studies from around 30 years ago found a much smaller population of monkeys than we have today. Researchers in 1981 counted 81 macaques, but toward the end of the decade the numbers dipped to 72. Urbanisation and the invasion of the countryside by leisure seekers were blamed for the falling monkey trend. But this conclusion was turned on its head in the following years. The 600 found in 1991 suggests that the previous count might not have been the full picture. The average ten percent annual rise tracked from then on showed a clear population growth. Monkeys were out-breeding the stress-laden people of Hong Kong, one newspaper reported.

    The animals are fabulously popular. Who doesn’t love a monkey, especially ones that have the cheek to beg for nuts? Monkey feeding became a popular Hong Kong pastime. Just outside of densely packed residential zones there are big swathes of greenery, fantastic woodlands that are good for monkeys, and easy for humans to reach. Over the past thirty years, since people discovered that leisure could actually be a part of a Hong Kong lifestyle, there has been a steady stream of city-folk going up the hills to feed wild monkeys.

Source: AFCD

    The activity offers a counter-balance to Hong Kong life, normally seen as a joyless urban grind in the pursuit of money. Visiting monkeys in the woodlands provides access to wildlife and greenery, it is good for children and it is good for the elderly. Feeding them is even better, some people think, an act of benevolence with environmentalist overtones.

    But it doesn’t quite work like that. The macaques may appear to thrive, as their population growth suggests, but their decadent lifestyle is ultimately endangering their existence. Even world-famous primate expert Jane Goodall made comments about our humble troops. She noted they were eating junk food and getting obese. She strongly urged a feeding ban. 

    It isn’t just a matter of health. Human feeding of monkeys is turning them into fat, lazy thugs. Many of the primates have lost their natural fear of people and have become increasingly aggressive in the pursuit of food. In some cases monkeys that started life as beggars have turned into blatant muggers.  They are in danger of abandoning their natural foraging behaviour, in favour of free handouts from humans, or if that doesn’t work, daylight robbery. The very success of the strategy of scrounging off humans is endangering them on several levels, perhaps most crucially, by annoying their human hosts.

    Recent human-animal conflicts have included a 46-year old hiker who was hospitalised after falling 20 metres into a reservoir trying to flee a pack of macaques. She suffered head, arm and leg injuries as the wild animals lunged for a bag of nuts she happened to be carrying. Another woman ended up in hospital after being mugged for a box of egg tarts. Both cases beg the question, what were these people doing in well-known monkey territory visibly carrying food?

    The conflict goes both ways, though the level violence is one-sided. Monkeys have been stabbed to death by humans, they have been hunted, trapped and butchered. Evidence of monkey hunting has triggered rumours of an underground trade for the mainland wild meat market. A local newspaper reported the slaughter of 300 monkeys in 2009, according to a group of people who volunteered to protect monkeys. AFCD were unable to confirm the report, but the story reflects the concern that followed the known attacks.

    A feeding ban has been in place since 1997 and banners on footpaths near monkey troops clearly state that giving food to macaques can lead to a maximum 10,000 Hong Kong dollar fine. But some habits are nearly impossible to stamp out. AFCD told me in 2011 that they had fined 104 people for illegal feeding in the previous year. It seems like a high prosecution rate, but the number of people successfully charged is always going to be a fraction of the real number of offenders.

    I have seen people throwing cakes, biscuits and bread from car windows, and I’ve seen scattered fruit peelings, and other debris of human food on monkey paths. A quick search on YouTube reveals any number of fools filming themselves handing out sweets, pastries and bananas. Travellers’ blogs marvel at monkeys biting into cans of beer.

    The problem could be that AFCD are going too soft on the feeders. The average fine in 2010 came in at 567 Hong Kong dollars, less than 6 percent of the prohibitive 10,000 people are threatened with.

    More than 500 monkey nuisance cases were logged by AFCD in 2013, better than the 2006 peak of 1,400, but still a lot of complaints about monkeys behaving badly. This is no new problem around the world, especially with macaques which have a particularly long history of interaction with human society. A study in India found that almost half the rhesus macaque population lived in cities, towns and villages. Another 37 percent had regular contact with humans along roads and canal banks, leaving just 14 percent of them living completely apart from people. Given the close relationship that macaques have always had with humans we have to ask what we really mean by the natural environment of these species?

    

Credit: Saskia Dijk Uni of Kent

It isn’t easy to answer that, but in Hong Kong something had to be done to restore a more “natural” relationship between people and monkeys. So our solution was to put them on contraceptives.

    Experiments in monkey birth control started some 15 years ago when a batch of females were injected with a contraceptive called SpayVac, which produces antibodies that cause eggs to reject sperm. Elsewhere in the world the same stuff has been used on horses, deer, seals and wolves. But Hong Kong was the first to try it out on feral monkeys. It is a temporary measure allowing for normal sexual behaviour while providing sterility for 3 to 5 years. At the same time some males were permanently vasectomised with another type of injected contraceptive.

    Capturing animals for the scheme turned out to be more difficult than experts had estimated. The problem was that monkeys quickly learned that government agents were after them. Most capture methods could only be used a few times before the animals learned to avoid them. Sometimes an alfa male would recognise a cage, so he would police the trap and forbid young monkeys from entering. Other times the leaders directly attacked AFCD staff. Government capture methods included net-guns, cage traps, drugged food, live decoys, dart-guns, food traps, and snares. Before long the monkeys recognised individual AFCD staff and their vehicles. They would scatter their clan and scarper as soon as they spotted agents. Not suprisingly the capture stage took months longer than planned.

    Despite these teething problems, the contraceptive scheme has been viewed a success. After the initial trials by AFCD, the work was subcontracted to the private sector, including the Ocean Park Conservation Foundation. Ocean Park introduced another type of surgical vasectomy for females, rendering them permenantly sterile. 

Monkey examination: AFP

    I watched the capture and medical examination of a group under the direction of Italian vet Paulo Martelli.  Part of a troop had been lured into a large custom made walk-in cage left in place for long enough to allow the monkeys to become confident. For days feeders recognised and trusted by the macaques kept a fresh supply of food inside the cages, but little known to the primates, their suppliers were double-agents working for the government. They wait for a moment when the cage is at its fullest, then shut the doors by remote control while the unsuspecting animals feast on without a care. Once trapped, Martelli and team arrive, complete with vials of ketamine that knock the monkeys out. It is only then that the monkeys start to panic. The cages have moving parts that press macaques against the side where an anaethetist can get at a limb with a hypodermic needle.

     Knocked-out monkeys are dunked in disinfectant and laid out on a trolley in a field hospital quickly put together on-site by a team of experts, technicians and vetinary students. 

     “Between the uterus and the ovaries there are small tubes that we cut out in very precise keyhole surgery. We go in, remove two pieces of tube and come out. It takes a few minutes,” Martelli told me.

     Once the operation or examination is complete the animals are laid out in a recovery cage four or five at a time, which then opens into the main communal section as they shrug off their ketamine hangover. When they are all ready the doors of the main section are opened and the monkeys bolt for their lives. The dozen I saw shoot out of the trap could not have reached the tree tops faster if they had been able to fly. 

      The progamme is not about eliminating the population, it’s about making it possible for the wild animals to continue to co-exist with us in the city. As of 2014 about 2,700 individuals had undergone some form of contraceptive process and the current population is estimated to be around 2,000, distributed in 30 social groups. Numbers are down about 15 percent since 2009 and the birthrate has dropped by more than half, suggesting a continued reduction in the number of newborns in the coming years, according to CT Shek at AFCD.

     I asked him what the 'ideal' macaque population would be, but he replied that there is no set goal and complaints against the beasts would continue to be monitored. He emphasised that birth control was only part of the programme and public education was also necessary, to teach people how to co-exist with monkeys. And as Karthi Martelli, project manager with the Ocean Park conseration group, pointed out, “It really depends on what people can tolerate. Sometimes sighting a monkey is the reason for a person to call. This would be recorded as a nuisance complaint even if the monkey hasn’t done anything. I always tell people: mind your monkey manners. When you’re scared you do stupid things and people blame the monkeys. If you ignore the monkey and walk away they get bored too. They don’t plot to attack.”

    

Since Hong Kong's pioneering venture into wild monkey birth control other authorities have followed suit in macaque havens including Malaysia, Singapore and India. But human involvement with the species goes much deeper than the micro-management of feral populations trialed here.

    Scientific experiments on the species, who share 93 percent of our genes, have bound these animals to our fate for decades already, and the relationship continues. It is ironic that while Hong Kong is a testing ground on the use of contraceptives to control feral macaques, the same species has been used to test the effectiveness and safety of human contraceptives. But contraceptives are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to macaque contributions to science.

    Rhesus macaques define our blood types from before we are born. The Rhesus factor is an indicator of how likely it is that the immune system of a pregnant mother will attack the blood group of her unborn child. The name rhesus stuck because the phenomenon was understood after experiments with blood from the rhesus macaque.

    Other than that the species have been test subjects for research on polio, malaria, neurology, obesity, HIV, and dementia, to list a selection of recent studies. They have also made contributions to psychology, sociology, bio-warfare and thought controlled prosthetics.

    The species was the first primate to achieve space flight, reaching orbit well before Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 mark, though admittedly under human direction and without consent. It was also the second primate to have its gene sequence completely de-coded, following the publication of the human genome in 2001. Comparison showed a 93 percent identity between us and rhesus macaques, who we last shared a common ancestor with 25-million-years ago. The chimpanzee genome was completed two years later in 2005, showing a last common ancestor with humans just 6-million-years ago, and a 98 percent match with our DNA. Referring back to the macaque genome sheds light on how humans and chimps evolved separately. In particular it shows which genes humans gained, or even which ones we lost to make us human.

    Scientific interest in macaques has generated a lucrative trade that continues today. In the 1960s India exported up to 50,000 macaques a year, mostly for biological research. The trade was so large that it threatened wild populations of the monkey species and the country banned exports in 1978. Soon after that China established macaque breeding programmes to plug the gap in the market, fuelled mostly by the demands of pharmaceutical companies in the US and Europe. Now with 23 established breeding centres, China is the world’s biggest supplier of rhesus and long-tailed macaques for experiments, according to a paper published by Conservation International. There is a good argument that a country like China that tolerates little dissent is convenient to western drug companies for locating breeding centres for lab-monkeys, away from the scrutiny of animal rights campaigners.

    The lab-monkey trade received a boost in 2004 after the passage of 'project bioshield' into United States’ law. The bill provided a 5.6 billion dollar budget for research to bolster defenses against biological attacks by terrorists.  Its passage was helped by a massive political boost from the September 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil.

    The hijackings on that day killed all passengers and crew of four domestic flights and some 3,000 people on the ground in New York’s World Trade Centre towers. Those events led to strong demand that security weaknesses should be fixed, and the political pressure to pour cash into solutions. People needed to feel safe, and one area of vulnerability was seen in the threat of bio-terrorism.

    Even under normal conditions biological warfare has sinister overtones, but when an anthrax attack disseminated through the US postal system only weeks after the 9/11 hijackings, people were terrified. Five people died and 17 people sickened in the worst biological attack in US history. 

     

Photo: AP

In a truly baffling turn of events we now know that the only official suspect in the case remains a disgruntled FBI specialist in germ warfare who committed suicide before he was brought to trial. And in the attacks, he used anthrax spores developed in a US government lab. But despite the bizare homegrown source of the attack, the political will to act against germ warfare had already been unleashed. So US lawmakers made billions of dollars available to pharmaceutical companies offering solutions against the external bio-terrorist threat. Suddenly drug firms needed monkeys to test antidotes to anthrax, botulism and nerve gas.  After all, you can’t test the effects of bio-warfare on human volunteers.

    One species in particular – long-tailed macaques – came into demand, with devastating consequences on populations close to Hong Kong, according to a 2008 article published by Conservation International for the IUCN.

    Cambodia’s long-tailed population has been decimated in the wild since 2003, mostly for export to China and the US, argued researcher Ardith Eudey in the paper. Although China’s breeding centres supply the legal trade in macaques, demand outstripped supply for several years. And Eudey argued that wild animals caught in Cambodia were being laundered into the market through legitimate fronts. The process appears to start in farms that have special licences to breed from captured animals. The resulting offspring from these breeding centres are legally traded for export, but they help to mask the underground trade in animals caught in the wild.

    Live macaques are caught in rainforests, often by felling trees to isolate them, and then passed on to the international market with forged CITES documents, transiting through Vietnam and China. In 2007 the US officially imported about 24,000 long-tailed macaques, 7,000 more than just three years earlier. US buyers paid an average of $1,475 per monkey in 2008, while suppliers at the other end of the chain earned about 55 dollars for each macaque. In 2012 official data showed about 15,000 imports to the US, with 56 percent of them coming from China and 8 percent from Cambodia.

    Recognising the pressure that long-tailed macaques came under after India’s ban on exporting rhesus macaques, there are calls to re-evaluate the ‘least concern’ status of the species under IUCN listings. Eudey said that the Cambodian population of wild macaques had become virtually extinct, forcing traders to look wider for supply. In 2007 Malaysia lifted a ban on the export of macaques, after law makers argued that controls were needed on the exploding urban population. Hong Kong’s population has never been large enough for any serious consideration to exploit for profit, but considering that some new monkey breeding centres have been set up with Hong Kong investment, the idea must have at least crossed some minds.

    Here there is official will to protect and preserve the macaque population, even if the ideal demographic hasn’t yet been decided. The contractive programme is seen as a successful management plan, with broad approval from conservationists and animal rights groups. There are many good reasons to preserve the feral beasts, not least because they are incredibly clever, with powers of intellect that sometimes reach mythological proportions.

    Never mind the odd individual monkey that can learn how to open car doors or unscrew water bottle tops. One troop of gifted macaques has been trained to shoot AK-47s at US soldiers. So said The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling communist party. The story appeared online on June 28, 2010 and accompanying photos were even highlighted in the editor’s picks. It claimed that Taliban warlords had trained macaques to use Kalashnikovs, Bren light machine guns and trench grenades. They learned to spot US soldiers by their uniform, and shoot at them. It was an instructive story, not so much about the genius of monkeys, of which it revealed nothing, but about the stupidity that official state media is capable of falling to. Experts universally derided the claims, saying it was impossible to teach monkey's to use AK-47s against “enemy” combatants.

    In man’s world, full of violence and lies, it’s no wonder that monkeys sometimes run scared. With dwindling forest populations, thousands of brethren kidnapped for the lucrative lab-monkey trade, and well meaning vets lining up to castrate them, there may well be reason for a monkey to make a bid for freedom. And that’s exactly what one Hong Kong macaque did some years back, though he was probably running in the wrong direction. 

    A two-day chase started when someone spotted a wild primate at the Tsim Sha Tsui ferry pier at the end of Kowloon’s “Golden mile” shopping district. He was separated from the normal wild monkey zone by about four kilometres of densely rammed shopping malls, thundering bus-lanes, and jammed housing blocks. Police and government vets pursued the monkey for ten hours that hot July day, until the feral beast slipped from their sights as darkness set in. Officials spotted the animal early the next day, but again lost sight of it near the waterfront tourist spot after five hours. 

    The next sighting puzzled the vets, police and government agents who were frantically looking for the wild interloper. It appeared on the other side of Victoria harbour, near the Wan Chai ferry pier. It may have stowed away on a Star Ferry, or found its way across the harbour tunnel, perhaps hitching a ride on a truck. Or did it even swim? No one knows, but the animal continued to evade capture on Hong Kong side. It crashed through the hurly burley of Wan Chai’s red light district, and into Causeway Bay’s throng of shoppers. Dozens of officials chased the beast, through backstreets, into malls and even inside shops, as word spread among a growing crowd of spectators and supporters.

    By the time the plucky beast was finally brought down by tranquilliser dart it had well and truly earned Hong Kong celebrity status.