Bad primate briefs

New York Times:

Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.

“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”

(Another remarkable chimp face photo by Flickr user ucumari.)

Summer of Monkey Madness

The last month or so has been prime season for primates running amok. In early June, a pet monkey in Ohio unclipped itself from its leash and ran wild for a couple of hours, attacking and scratching two children before being recaptured. Just a few days later, a rhesus macaque was found to be missing from the Yerkes primate research center in Georgia, and at last report, neighbors are still cowering in their homes in fear of encountering it.

Later in the month, a repeat offender was found to be still on the run: the near-legendary Tampa Bay monkey was caught on video, proving a local's claim that the monkey is still out there and regularly visits his yard.

Monkey trouble has not been confined to North America. Also in June, Cambodian officials finally had to draw the line at a temple where the hooliganish behavior of a couple of hundred monkeys is usually tolerated. After a series of visitors were bitten, the worst of the "gangster" monkeys are being tranquilized and rounded up - this is after attempts to trap them using eggs laced with sleeping pills failed to fool the canny primates.

The most disturbing story of the pack, though, comes from India. In New Delhi, monkeys have learned how to work the new automatic doors at a hospital, and can now stroll in at will. If you think a monkey would be a nice diversion at visiting hours, think again:

They have terrorised patients, stealing food, playing with medical equipment, and attacking staff.

Worse, due to local cultural sensitivities, measures to deal with the problem are severely restricted:

Killing or trapping the monkeys was not an option, due to their association with the Hindu deity Hanuman... Authorities have taken steps to scare off the monkeys. They have hired two larger monkeys to chase them away.

That's right: their only recourse is to rely on other monkeys. Wish them luck.


Cartoon look inside the primate mind from Bizarro Comics thanks to Genius Chimp.

"Vegetarian orang-utans eat world's cutest animal"

That's the headline from New Scientist, reporting on a study published in the International Journal of Primatology.

I could just let that headline and adorable photo stand for itself. But no, it's my job, so I'm going to rub it in. Humans love to believe that our primate relatives are basically nicer people than we are, but this is the sort of thing we always find when we look more closely. And don't think these guys are just stumbling upon roadkill and figuring what the hell, it's already dead. It's quite deliberate and calculated:

In 2007 Hardus was tracking two orangs in the canopy above her – a female called Yet and her infant Yeni – when Yet abruptly changed direction and approached a slow loris (Nycticebus coucang). She knocked it out of the tree, crashed down to the ground, bit the stunned loris's head, then carried the body back into the tree to eat it. When Yeni begged, she was allowed to share the meat. The great apes each chomped on opposite ends of the dead primate, sharing it between them like lovers might a strand of spaghetti.

The researcher also found that in all documented cases the orang stunned the loris before proceeding. This is a precaution that shows some forethought, since slow lorises have another highly unusual quality aside from their extreme cuteness: they have toxic saliva, so you don't want to get bitten before you take a bite.

Oh, and if you don't believe it? Click on the link. She got video. In these days of cameras everywhere, even apes can't hide their bad behavior for long.


Tasty little fellow photographed by Flickr user underwhelmer.

Ambivalent intelligent badness

If you happen to forget a screwdriver in the gorilla cage, the animals will hesitantly approach it, briefly sniff it, and subsequently ignore it.

Leave it in a chimp cage, and it will be used in vigorous display, thrown about, and forgotten.

But if you leave it in the orangutan cage, one of the animals will unobtrusively pick it up, hide it, and use it to let itself out when you’ve left for the day.

– Benjamin Beck, author of Animal Tool Behavior (quoted here).

If you've ever doubted that apes have minds like ours, especially the much more alien-looking orangutan, check out this story. Here's an animal that not only can figure out how to use the wrong tool for the job, but can have second thoughts about it once it's done. I don't know what could be more human.

NEW ORLEANS - Using only a stretched green T-shirt and powerful upper-body strength, a Sumatran orangutan named Berani escaped from his Audubon Zoo enclosure Friday -- for about 10 minutes.

Employing a level of cunning that could have come from a prison movie, the brownish-orange primate stretched the shirt, scaled a 10 1/2-foot wall to the top of the moat, wrapped the shirt around the "hot" electrical wires surrounding the exhibit and swung out about 12:45 p.m., zoo spokeswoman Sarah Burnette said.

Berani means "brave" in Bornean, Burnette said, but on Friday afternoon, it could have meant "reluctant."

"He seemed like he wanted to get back into the exhibit," Burnette said. "That's the way it is in zoos. . . . He jumped over the enclosure and jumped back in."

Berani, who didn't harm anyone, used a T-shirt that had been tossed into the enclosure as a toy for the 150-pound adolescent male and two female orangs, Blaze and Feliz....

Berani was "very congenial, not threatening," she said. "He wanted to explore a little bit and figured it was time to get back home because his zookeeper was yelling at him."

...The zoo also likely will adjust the mix of primate playthings.

"We gave them T-shirts every day," Burnette said. "Not anymore."

Read the whole article by John Pope at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Photo from Wikipedia by Tom Low

Conspiracy protects famous monkey on the lam

Longtime followers of this blog may recall the Tampa Bay Mystery Monkey, a macaque that's been roaming Florida since 2009. We last checked in with this primate when he was sighted taking a dip in a woman's swimming pool and stealing grapefruit from her tree. His frustrated pursuers reported that they'd hit him with bigger and bigger doses of tranq darts to no effect.

The local newspaper has maintained a web page dedicated to coverage of sightings and attempts to capture the monkey, and of course he has his own Facebook page.

But despite this widespread awareness and repeated capture attempts, he's still on the loose - and attentive readers of this blog will not be surprised at the revelation that he's had human help evading the authorities.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that for the last six months the monkey has been living in the yard of a retired couple, where he's allegedly particularly attached to their elderly mother and aged cat:

He waits on the firewood pile for his morning banana and walks ahead of the elderly woman, as if to protect her, as she walks up a long driveway to get the newspaper.

The monkey is gentle with the sickly, old cat, sometimes picking her up and moving her to a sunnier spot on the patio. He loves Oreo cookies, twisting the tops off and licking the frosting. The family has it on video.

A wildlife official was appalled to hear about the sitation. "This is dangerous and someone's going to get seriously hurt, and it's going to cause us to have to kill this animal on site," he said. "What they're doing is they're teaching him not to be cautious around people. In the end, it always ends badly."

And the monkey does seem to have a secret life to some extent, sometimes disappearing for a day or two and returning with a banana or a cookie from somewhere else.

But while the couple say they know he's a wild animal and would never touch him or let him in the house - "He's got fangs," the husband said - they've worked to gain his trust and are so protective of the monkey that they only spoke to reporters on the condition that their names and location be kept secret.

And other professional monkeyhuggers are on their side:

Dr. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropology and primate expert at the University of Notre Dame who has followed the monkey's story for two years, was thrilled to hear of his new home. He saw the latest photos, noting his coat, skin and face indicated a fairly low-stress, healthy life. This, he said, is the happy ending everyone should want for the monkey.

"He needs a family, he needs a social group, and he found it," Fuentes said. "He's never going to leave. The nice woods make him feel comfortable. There are two options: Let him find whatever joy he can get out of life or kill him. I don't see any reason to kill him."

More primate prostitution

It's not news that certain primates pay for sex - not people, I mean, but we know about those macaques that are willing to give it up in exchange for a nice grooming.

So it's no surprise that our closer relatives do it too - but at least they have the sense to hold out for better pay. Male chimps pay with meat for mating, say researchers from the Max Planck Institute:

"By sharing, the males increase the number of times they mate, and the females increase their intake of calories," said Dr Gomes.

"What's amazing is that if a male shares with a particular female, he doubles the number of times he copulates with her, which is likely to increase the probability of fertilising that female."

As we've seen in the past, though, researchers find ways to make excuses for the relatives, arguing that this is less like prostitution and more like... marriage?

"We looked at chimps when they were not in oestrus, this means they don't have sexual swellings and aren't copulating."

"The males still share with them - they might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later."

...Professor Gurven, who was not involved in this study, added that the nature of this exchange of meat for sex is "kind of like pair bonding in humans, because it's long-term."

No comment!


(Full of himself chimp by Flickr user Misterqueue.)

World Cup Wildlife

As an American and not a sports fan, I may be prejudiced, but somehow I'm not surprised that the World Cup is bringing out the hooligan in our fellow species:

A parrot in England has caught World Cup fever - and she's added bad language to her taste for vodka and Coke and habit of bathing in beer:

Landlady Amanda Weston, 50, who runs the Duke of Albany pub in Weymouth, Dorset, said: "She loves watching the football and after Saturday's performance it was things like 'come on England you w*****s' and 'shoot the ref'.

Landlord Malcolm Weston, 52, said: "Roxy is a saucy bird. She does raise an eyebrow or two. She comes out with swear words I have never even heard of. I think she's brilliant."

On location at the World Cup itself, though, they've got more to worry about than a little bad language. We reported earlier on concerns that baboons that steal from cars would target tourists, but they're not confining themselves to either tourists or vehicles. Journalist Henry Winter gave a play-by-play of the action at breakfast one morning via his Twitter feed:

Baboons everywhere, grabbing bread off table. Kitchen cats hissing at them & staff seeing them off with pebbles & paint-ball gun. Score-draw.

Baboons just taken the lead - & the sugar, five sachets at a time, even the canderel, now sitting in trees, pouring sugar down throats. 2-1.

Baboons on roof now just out of range of gun-man firing small marbles. “I aim for the arse” says Mr Primate Control. Accurate up to 50 yards.

Nothing is sacred to these maruading primates - not even the athletes themselves and their innocent families. One bunch invaded a hotel room at a resort in Sun City occupied by the family of England's Peter Crouch.

The footballer's fiancee was quoted as saying "These three baboons jumped in, walked straight through the bedroom into the lounge to the fruit bowl, took what they wanted and walked out.” Clearly a levelheaded woman, she doesn't make it sound like much, but remember, these are baboons:

A source close to the family said: “One minute they were sat back having a bit of peace and quiet, the next thing they were confronted by these terrifying beasts.

“It all sounds funny to say some monkeys popped in and burgled them. The actual experience was anything but.

It was like having wild Alsatian dogs in the lounge with them. Fortunately they left without causing any harm.”

The family got off easy: The Johannesburg Times reports that they ignored warnings to keep sliding doors and windows locked in unoccupied rooms. Let's hope they learned their lesson.


Baboon with no respect for property from Flickr user tedlington.

Bad animal headlines

There are so many bad animals I can't keep up with giving them each the attention they deserve.

-Fox steals handbag

"Fortunately the cheeky little fox didn't manage to work out my Pin number and my bank accounts were not touched."

-Man knocked out of his kayak by seal and rescued by lifeboat

“It appeared that the man had been fishing from his kayak and had caught about 20 mackerel and had them in a net over the side. A seal bumped into the kayak capsizing it and grabbed the net and fish for its tea."

-Aggressive snake slithers down chimney and attacks police 

Officers used containment tactics and avoided repeated attempts by the animal to sink its fangs into them before eventually capturing the creature with the help of a bin, a takeaway pizza box and some gaffer tape. 

-3 injured by bear in Fukushima town
This one is mostly notable for the perfectly terrible computer-animated re-enactment video.

And finally, the source of today's photo:


Monkey is regular at Mumbai swimming pool

Every day for the past week, the primate has been showing up at the Kalidas Swimming Pool around 7 am — swimming without a worry for about an hour, much to the astonishment of regulars. For a couple of days, the facility's caretakers tried to scare the monkey away, but it would return for its hourly swim the next morning.

Video here.

Monkey on the lam

A famous roving primate in Florida was spotted again: he broke into a woman's enclosed swimming pool, took a dip, and stole some grapefruit from her backyard trees on his way out.

For over a year the rhesus macaque has evaded capture, even though pursuers have managed to hit it with tranquilizer darts, which are worse than useless, according to one source involved in the pursuit:

"The drugs just don't seem to affect him for whatever reason," said Yates. "We've increased the dosage every time that we've shot him. What we're really doing is turning him into a drug addict."

(As if being a thief and an addict isn't enough, the monkey's other offense is being another of those animals who have more Facebook friends than I do.)

We wish the Florida authorities luck in their continuing efforts, and agree with Stephen Colbert, who's been persistent in keeping this story before the public: "I believe animals should be in their natural habitat: behind bars."



Monkey in the pool room by break-in victim Renee Barth from the St. Petersburg Times.

Monkeys above their station

Might as well make it an all-primate week, since there's never a shortage of monkey trouble:

-in New Delhi, a bus driver who was letting his pet monkey ride on his shoulder rammed his vehicle into a house, injuring three.

Police said Prabhakaran and his “friend” were sharing a particularly affectionate moment when things went awry: the animal was picking lice from the 22-year-old’s hair, possibly lulling him into a lazy trance, when he lost control.

According to the passengers, the monkey had been a nuisance even when was not playing around with Prabhakaran, a disturbance throughout the journey as it scampered from part of the bus to another.

Prabhakaran confessed to having brought the three-month-old monkey — police officers don’t know yet if the animal answered to a name — from his village as he didn’t want to leave his “friend” back home while he was at work.

The driver narrowly escaped a crowd that police described as "baying for his blood," lost his job, and may go to jail. But - of course - no word on punishment for the monkey, who seems equally to blame.

This bus driver is far from the only one these days who doesn't understand that monkeys need to be kept in their place. In Thailand, a macaque (pictured above)has joined the police force, on the theory that this is going to improve troubled relations with Muslim separatists.

But don't think it's just in Asia where monkeys are being treated in ways that are likely to go to their heads. In the US, your service monkey will probably have a pleasanter experience in the airport than you will: new TSA regulations make sure that monkeys may not be manhandled by screeners.

Justice!

Rarely are the animals whose offenses are reported on this blog ever punished. But the monkey who peed on the president of Zambia, and his entire monkey tribe, are paying for their crime by being banished!

LUSAKA (AFP) – Zambia President Rupiah Banda has ordered scores of monkeys removed from the grounds of his official residence, after one urinated on his head during a press conference, a parks official said Tuesday.

More than 200 monkeys live on the State House grounds, but Banda has asked the Munda Wanga Botanical Gardens to relocate most of them to its parkland outside Lusaka, the gardens' director Bill Thomas said in a statement.

"The president recently requested to the Munda Wanga Botanic Trust to remove and relocate some of the monkeys, and so far 61 monkeys have been humanely captured and translocated to the gardens," Thomas said.

OK, so they're still going to be living in a park, and humanely captured instead of slapped around a little. But given the stuff that animals usually get completely away with, we'll take what we can get.

That perfect peeing primate once again from Flickr user dornfeld.

Primate plotting

A chimp at a zoo in Sweden has convinced some skeptics that humans aren't the only animals that can plan for the future. But what does an animal do when it can plan for the future? Plan to behave badly, of course.

Santino had a habit of throwing stones at zoo visitors(and from personal experience I can say, any zookeeper can sympathize). That's not unusual - primates are well known to throw even less savory objects at passing humans. What's significant is that he gathered ammunition when no one was watching and hid caches of it around his exhibit. Another indication that he knew exactly what he was doing: when the zoo was closed to visitors over the winter, he didn't bother to gather and hide rocks.

Well, as anyone knows who's observed humans, intelligence isn't all it's cracked up to be. But the humans, having exhausted all their other options to keep zoo visitors safe, had the last laugh in this case:

"They have castrated the poor guy. They hope that his hormone levels will decrease and that will make him less prone to throw stones. He's already getting fatter and he likes to play much more now than before. Being agitated isn't good for him," said (researcher) Osvath.

(Photo of a chimp obviously thinking wicked thoughts by Flickr user ucumari.)

Animals behaving humanly, part 2

Perhaps the most presumptuous behavior possible is an animal thinking it can actually replace us in our jobs.

It's bad enough if it's a fairly low paid profession, like the monkeys that wait tables in Japan, or the dog we met in an earler post who worked in a gas station.

Some animals have tried to usurp the place of much more skilled professionals, though. Fortunately, we'll see today and next time, some of them have gotten their comeuppance.

You've probably seen the stories about elephants and other animals painting pictures which are sold for fundraisers for zoos. The latest artistic star in the news is an orangutan at the Vienna Zoo, who's been taking photos, and in an even more up-to-date touch, posting them on a Facebook page. (And yes, with over 81,000 fans, she's more popular than you are.)

The truth is that the ape's motivations have nothing to do with artistic self-expression: the camera is rigged to dispense raisins when she clicks the shutter.

"Of course the apes don't care about the pictures, they are just an accidental side product," a zoo spokesman has been widely quoted as saying, but in case you're not convinced, the esteemed National Geographic took it upon themselves to get to the bottom of the story of this pretentious primate. In an interview, the deputy director of the zoo, Harald Schwammer, said:

The company Samsung came up with the suggestion. It was their idea to advertise their camera! For me as zoologist and curator, it is an enrichment project with some opportunities for behavioral studies. To be clear, the orang does not know that it is making pictures with the camera!

All of the orangs in the group manipulate the instrument and turn a switch. After this switch is turned, a raisin falls out. By turning the switch, the photo is taken. Therefore, the orangutan does not know that this is a camera and that they are making pictures, they are only trying to get a reward from the machine.

It is just like the elephant paintings that are going around the world with false information: elephants are not able to paint a tree or flowers; they are trained for this. There is no creative touch, no artistic approach!

We've seen before on this blog that orangs have a knack for using objects to make trouble,and Schwammer reminds us to be careful what we give an orang to play with:

There was nothing surprising concerning the orangutans' behavior. We knew that they use and manipulate every object they touch. If you give them a machine-gun, they will soon find out how to shoot it.

Photo of one of her suspicious-looking orang comrades - purely accidentally, of course - by Nonja.

World's oldest profession

Apparently both paying for sex and prices that respond to market forces go way back in our evolutionary heritage.

TIME MAGAZINE - In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up....

Researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male's odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

And whether you're one of the cool kids matters too, lead researcher Michael Gumert told Discovery News:

"Powerful individuals can take more and give less than low-ranked individuals can," he said, suggesting that such corruption of the fair trade ideal appears to be an inherent facet of primate social life that can apply to everything from monkey sex to human politics. High-ranking females can also skew the system because, in the case of macaques, they demand more attention before they agree to mate.

(Photo by researcher Michael Gumert from Discovery News.)

Monkey madness news roundup

-President Obama is scheduled to visit India next week. Whereever a world leader goes there are security issues, but in India, humans are not the only primate that are a potential problem. The Telegraph reports:

Delhi's police are to build 30-feet towers in jungle surrounding President Obama's hotel to protect him from terrorist attacks during next week's visit, and also shield from an invasion by the city's most persistent threat – monkeys.

They have been asked to erect 'machan' towers for elite commandos who will use powerful searchlights and night-sight binoculars to lookout for suspicious movement and any signs of a simian invasion.

Alongside heavily armed antiterrorist commandos, trained monkey-catchers will also be deployed.

- There's no mention of another monkey control method sometimes used in India, and perhaps for good reason. At the Commonwealth Games earlier this fall, a squad of trained anti-monkey monkeys was deployed. But apparently hiring standards are not rigorous enough to screen out thugs who abuse their power: One tried to steal a BBC reporter's phone, sending him to the hospital for treatment of a wound and rabies and tetanus shots. And they're no more reliable with the locals: recently in one neighborhood, the langur monkey brought in to protect people from monkey attacks didn't exactly solve the problem when it bit one of the residents.

-Elsewhere, a repeat offender is caught in Croatia:

This Macaque ape made a monkey of zoo security when he was caught slipping out of his cage to raid local gardens for tasty snacks.

Keen veg grower Zdenek Lounovi, 70, could barely believe his eyes when he looked down his back lawn and saw the beast munching on his rhubarb and turnips.

...Keepers at nearby Olomouc Zoo admitted the ape was theirs and set up a hidden camera in his enclosure to check how he had been getting out.

"He was pretty sneaky. He'd pulled part of his fence away and covered the hole with a board so he could come and go as he pleased."

- And finally, the photo above was taken by a tourist as he was being insulted by a mandrill called Jackson at the San Francisco Zoo. Zoo authorities explained that the monkey did not mean to be rude, that the gesture was merely the result of "a form of arthritis."

Yeah, sure.

Losing the monkey wars in India

From the beginning this blog has been on top of the worldwide macaque problem. These monkeys make trouble everyplace in the world where they live close to humans - we've read about them in Singapore and Japan, but most of all in India, where the problem is compounded by the fact that they are considered sacred, limiting efforts to control them.

The problems with encouraging these monkeys should be obvious to everyone. As a recent report describes it:

More than 90 per cent carry tuberculosis, they swarm central government offices, prowl the landings, and bite through essential internet cables. Many attack people carrying food and even residents relaxing on their verandahs. Delhi's former deputy mayor was killed when he was attacked by a macaque on his apartment balcony and fell to his death.

How do people react to this unarguably bad behavior? Many continue to feed these creatures as a way to honor the god Hanuman. And as we were reminded recently, even when they're invading a hospital, the only culturally acceptable way they've come up with to control this population of well-nourished hooligans is to to rely on the help of other monkeys.

This approach is working about as well as readers of this blog should expect. Langur monkeys led around on a leash are supposed to frighten away the marauding macaques, but for one thing - and are we surprised? - these primates sometimes turn on humans themselves.

And now, it appears that the technique is losing effectiveness - the macaques are losing their fear of the langurs. Even more worrying, they've realized that they have an advantage over a team of one langur and one human:

Anuradha Sawney, a member of the Animal Welfare Board of India and owner of a monkey sanctuary just outside New Delhi, said the macaque's increasing boldness was down to its growing numbers in Delhi and its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.

"If there are a lot of macaques the group will be strong and they will not be afraid to fight," she said.

But that's not the worst of it. Also, says one voice from the trenches of the monkey wars, they're starting to think ahead:

Diljan Ali, a langur handler, complained that the government hires monkey men to confront the macaques but refuses to compensate them when their animals are defeated. "(The macaques) are very smart. They know when they have the advantage. They attack in numbers and when they do it's pre-planned."

We'll keep an eye on this developing story... let's hope the world primate uprising stays in the movies where it belongs.


In that photo from The Telegraph, note the monkey sitting on top of the cage. They're not that easy to fool.

Primate political opinion?

LUSAKA (AFP) — A monkey urinated on Zambian President Rupiah Banda as he spoke to reporters outside his State House offices on Wednesday.

"You have urinated on my jacket," a startled Banda told the monkey, one of many that makes their home in the trees outside his offices.

"I will give this monkey for lunch to Mr Sata," he joked, referring to opposition leader Michael Sata, who Banda defeated in last year's elections.

Banda is reported to have spent most of the news conference discussing the state of the economy - apparently monkeys are no happier about the global recession than the rest of us.

Zambian monkey poised to express his position by Flickr user dornfeld.

Bad primates from the archives

India isn't the only place that has trouble with macaques that don't know where to draw the line. They're also up to the usual primate pranks in Singapore, as Reuters reported in 2007:

Gangs of long-tailed macaque monkeys have been causing havoc in housing estates bordering nature reserves; stealing food and brawling on the streets.

"They roam the estate in groups of up to 20 …- rampaging the estate and turning over dustbins," one irate local wrote to the national paper in October.

"They enter the house, open cupboards, steal food and soil the premises".

Picnics are spoiled and snacks are snatched from bags while golfers tee off. Even the British Club has armed staff with brooms to shoo monkeys away from the gourmet buffet.

As usual when the relatives are involved, some are quick to make excuses.

"It's a very weird situation," said Sharon Chan, the National Parks official tasked with managing the macaques.

"It's not that they want to attack. They just think, if you have the food, why don't you share it? Why are you eating and not sharing? Can I have some? They cross the line".

Feeding monkeys has been banned, since it just encourages them. But despite fines of over a hundred dollars, some humans have no more self-control - or fear of the consequences - than their monkey cousins.

Whenever he gets time, 50-year old driver J.J. Jolibi buys ten dollars worth of bananas and heads for the roads by the reservoirs to feed and watch curb-crawling troops.

The self-described animal-lover has been warned twice, but isn't scared of fines:

"A fine is not very expensive," Jolibi said. "I'd feed them again. Maybe the judge will be an animal lover and give me a warning. If the judge hates monkeys, maybe he'll fine me".

Consultant Barbara Martelli, 42, who works with Chan, says stamping out feeding won't be easy, even among Singaporeans well used to a regular diet of government-sponsored education campaigns on everything from flushing toilets to speaking good Mandarin.

"It is good fun. You can't deny that it's good fun. Monkeys are sweet and funny," said Martelli.

Photo from Flickr user Shenghung Lin.

Malice aforethought

A chimp who made a breakthrough in the science of bad animals is back in the news.

As we reported previously, Santino had a habit of throwing stones at zoo visitors, but this was not just the usual spontaneous primate poop-throwing sort of thing: He gathered ammunition when no one was watching and hid caches of it around his exhibit. What's more, he didn't bother to collect these secret supplies when the zoo was closed to visitors over the winter.

It seemed obvious to many that he was gathering the stones to be ready to throw them at people, so Santino was used as an argument that animals can plan for the future, one of the many abilities that our species likes to claim are uniquely human.

But scientists, like everyone else, are reluctant to believe that animals deliberately behave badly, so some were still skeptical. Sure, he made piles of stones, but maybe he had collected them for some other reason, and they just happened to be at hand when he got the urge to hurl something.

But now researchers have reported additional evidence for Santino's carefully planned deception. First he learned to look innocent: instead of screaming and displaying his anger, he might just walk by munching on an apple, and then make his surprise attack.  And now, he's concealing the stones in ways that let him get closer to his victims before he throws them: for example, he'll place a pile of hay near where visitors hang out and use it to hide some stones. He's also used logs for the same purpose.

This behavior is new since the original research was reported. Perhaps once his fame spread, people knew not to get close when he was holding rocks, so he was inspired to new heights of deception.

Some scientists are still quibbling. But now, Santino, sensible people aren't coming near one of your hay piles. You're going to come up with something else new, and we'll be watching.

Never do a favor for a monkey

Readers of this blog know the risk of doing a good deed for a monkey. There was the Chinese fellow who took the trouble to teach his monkey martial arts, only to have them use their skills to attack him.

And there was the handicapped veteran who forgave his service monkey for an attack that landed him in the hospital - only to be attacked again the next week.


Sadly, another man in China had to learn his lesson the hard way.

A Chinese man who saved a one-armed, one-legged monkey says the primate has paid him back - by killing all of his chickens.

Li Chun, from Menghai village, Yunnan province, says the monkey has become a member of his family since he nursed it back to health.

It has become to devoted to the family and performs many chores around the home - but it also copies everything Li does.

When it saw him crack some eggs to make a meal it went into the hen coop and smashed all of the eggs it could find.

And when Li slaughtered a chicken, the monkey copied him and has since killed about 80 chickens, reports the Chuncheng Evening Post.

"From then on, whenever it's not occupied, it jumps into the chicken pen, and kills the chickens, no matter how big or small, and tries to pluck them," said Li.

"His record is nine chickens in one day. The lesson I have learned is to never slaughter a chicken in front of a monkey."

Thanks to Orange News UK for their hard work keeping the English-speaking world informed about animals behaving badly in China.