From the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/461119.stm Cheeky monkeys that attack tourists in a Japanese national park and raid local farms are in for a big shock.
Local officials want to give them electric shocks to reinstill a fear of people among the animals, reports New Scientist magazine.
But one of the Japan's leading primatologists has warned that the plan may be seriously flawed.
The wild monkeys live in the Nikko National Park, northeast of Tokyo, a popular tourist spot.
There has been an increasing number of incidents where wild monkeys have literally bitten the hands of the tourists who feed them. The monkeys also rampage across fields of nearby farms and eat crops.
No shooting Shooting the monkeys was banned two years ago. So now local officials propose a two-hour session of shock treatment for any monkeys that they catch. They are then released back into the wild, where the authorities also intend to frighten them with fireworks.
A spokesman for the Tochigi prefectural government says that an expert from Utsunomiya University has been consulted on the proposed measures. But the spokesman was unable to give details, nor could he say exactly how many volts would be used.
According to the Yomiuri newspaper, the director of the prefectural government's forestry office, Masaharu Fukuda, says the plan is the best possible way to drive the animals back to the mountains without shooting them.
But he admits, "I do feel a little sorry for the monkeys."
Shock result However, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a psychologist at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute, warns that the new policy is unlikely to be effective and could end up deeply traumatising the monkeys.
"Whether this is legal or ethical is another matter," he says.
Dr Matsuzawa points out that to assess the effectiveness of the measures, the officials need a control group which is not given shocks. "Then you can release both groups into the wild to see if one has a greater aversion towards humans."
He has also developed his own method of deterring the marauding monkeys.
The monkeys are injected with drugs so they feel slightly nauseous and then given food that they often steal from farms, such as apples. The monkeys begin to feel sick after their meal and learn to associate the feeling with what they have eaten.
"We were partially successful in making them averse to these foods," Dr Matsuzawa reports.
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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E7DA173CF931A25757C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=allTwo Years Later... Bigger Meaner Monkeys....America and McDonald's Blamed Japanese monkeys are becoming bigger and more aggressive because of their Western diets, complains Teruo Kanaya, a 60-year-old Nikko hotelier. By rooting through garbage bags or extorting food from tourists, he said, ''they have gotten bigger from 20 to 30 years of eating Western food, McDonald's, greasy, fatty food.''
Inter-primate harmony is fraying in this town, abutting Nikko National Park, where officials print pamphlets showing the year by year territorial advance of monkeys from park homeland. Some mothers now drive their children to school for fear of monkey attacks. Two years ago, Nikko became the first town in Japan to ban the feeding of monkeys.
''It just gets worse and worse,'' complained Toki Kaneda, 60, a resident of the Chuzenji Lake section who closed her souvenir store because of monkey theft. '
'We haven't been able to leave the windows of our second-floor rooms open for years.'' Increasingly, officials demonize monkeys as ''pests'' that ''infest'' farmland, causing at least $7 million crop damage a year. Nationwide, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper estimates, the number of monkeys killed by humans has soared over the last 25 years to about 10,000 a year today.
Nevertheless, like coyotes in the United States, monkey numbers in Japan keep increasing. With monkey bands moving from mountain areas to farm areas, their diet has improved, allowing most adult females now to have one baby a year.
Farmers who stay behind often wonder if they are growing vegetables only to provide monkeys with buffet salad bars. A new book, ''Protecting Mountain Fields From Monkeys,'' contains the latest in anti-monkey technology, including electric fences and 12-foot-high nets.
Not only has the number of Japan's hunters receded to 1960's levels, but an increasingly urban population looks aghast at hunting monkeys. Families of hunters suffer social ostracism. Children get teased at school if their fathers are known to be ''monkey killers.''
Still, rural villages sometimes post bounties of up to $1,000 for the leader of a particularly destructive monkey troop. In cities, sensational news reports about monkeys ''molesting women and children'' have stirred police officers to form monkey posses, patrolling streets with nets and bananas tied to poles.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16422061.000-shock-tactics.htmlFrom issue 2206 of New Scientist magazine, 02 October 1999, page 7
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