What do you do with hundreds of monkeys and apes rescued from the illegal wildlife trade? Build them a better home and conscript them as a force of monkey police.
Until now authorities have housed the animals at the Kabok Koo “Beast Feeding Center” east of Bangkok in Chachoengsao province, which will be turned into a “primate kingdom” and monkey police academy.
Technically considered evidence in various legal cases, the 400 monkeys and 100 gibbons and langurs will live in improved environments divided into spaces for different species.
Some of those animals will be deputized by local authorities to scare off the smaller long-tailed macaques, hundreds of which are very naughty monkeys who cause problems for residents in the area.
“We start training pig-tailed macaques of six months to one year old in what we call the monkey college at the centre,” said Teerapat Prayoonsit, director-general of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. “They are learning to take orders from trainers, and the next phase they will receive crowd-control training which should take at least one year.”
These trained monkeys will be unleashed into local communities which have long suffered at the paws of the macaques to meet out simian street justice.
The bigger, trained monkeys should be able to handle their mischievous cousins in Lop Buri but may need to pair up with a monkey partner to handle any monkey business, Teerapat added.
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