Fuzz, p.10
Fuzz, page 10
Is there any immunocontraceptive vaccine that might confer permanent sterility from a single shot? The National Wildlife Research Center and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management are currently testing one on a subset of a population of wild horses that has outgrown what its rangeland can support. The shot contains two active components (BMP-15 and GDF-9). Antibodies against these components hinder the egg’s ability to communicate with the cells that surround and support it, so it never matures. Because this vaccine wouldn’t require marking animals and tracking them down for a booster, it would seem to hold promise for treating urban macaques.
Qureshi sees a broader problem with immunocontraception, or any form of monkey contraception, for that matter. That is, people will expect the problem to start going away as soon as the treatment starts. “But you are not killing the animal,” he says. “They will live their life.” City macaques live twelve to fifteen years. Qureshi estimates it would take seven or eight years before the population drops enough for the effects to become noticeable to the average macaque-aggrieved Indian. “People will say, ‘You spent all that money and the problem is not gone?’ ”
Qureshi politely excuses himself. He has another meeting to go to. Ramesh walks outside with me to hail an autorickshaw and hops in beside me for the short drive to my hotel. Along the way, we pass a dry streambed where people dump garbage. Each time I’ve passed this spot, pigs or monkeys are picking through the mess. I ask whether there are efforts, as in Colorado, to get the garbage under control.
Ramesh answers that a cleanup campaign is underway. Where before there were only community dump sites, now the city has garbage trucks that drive from building to building. In one locality, the truck plays an inspirational ditty.
I ask how it’s going. Ramesh laughs. “The buildings are super multistory, so nobody bothers to go down and put it in the bins. They just drop the bag out the window.”
Humans.
One mildly satisfying element of India’s “monkey menace “is that the afflicted are often, for once, the upper classes. Urban monkeys prefer parks with trees and other landscaped spaces—the habitats of the well-to-do. From the boughs and greenery, they soon find their way onto roofs and terraces, through open windows, and into the buildings. They raid the mansions and offices of lawyers and judges. Monkeys have turned up in the prime minister’s digs and—to the delight of newspaper headline writers—the halls of Parliament.
“They walk around in chambers!” exclaimed Meera Bhatia, a lawyer who has advocated on behalf of the residents of an upscale, monkey-plagued housing development. I met Bhatia for coffee one afternoon in Delhi. She told me she belongs to an exclusive health club, the same one to which Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs. “They opened a new pool, and the monkeys were going in the water!”
Bhatia filed public interest litigation on behalf of her housing development, and in 2007, the Delhi High Court decreed that the city’s veterinary division must undertake a plan of action. At the moment, the burden weighs heaviest on one man: head veterinarian R. B. S. Tyagi, with whom I have an appointment in half an hour.
Tyagi’s office is on the eighteenth floor of the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC), the bureaucratic heart of Delhi. As if to bestow the proper mindset for your visit, the elevators take ten minutes to arrive. Aggravated civil servants must have jabbed the Up button so often and so peevishly that at some point it gave out. A sign is taped to the wall—DO NOT PRESS REPEATEDLY.
I wait. A janitor pushes a dust mop across the lobby. He walks a perfect line, slowly, almost ceremonially, like a bride coming down the aisle. Another man dust-mops the black marble tile outside the front doors. Say what you will about the government of Delhi, but they’ve got that dusty floor thing licked.
Tyagi waves me in. He directs me to sit in one of two chairs arranged in front of his desk, even though the other chair is still occupied, the man’s business with Tyagi apparently incomplete. Or perhaps he just feels like sitting there a while longer. On the wall behind Tyagi is a framed photograph of a koala. I have barely introduced myself when Tyagi begins talking. “We have been trapping monkeys as per directions of the High Court of Delhi. At present we have two monkey catchers. After trapping we relocate these monkeys to the Asola Bhatti mines. Details in this regard may be obtained from the chief wildlife warden of Delhi government, Dr. Ishwar Singh. Have you met him?”
I have tried. For weeks before I left for India, I would dial the number listed for Ishwar Singh on the forest department website. Day after day, no one picked up. I later came to know that only a sap tries to reach an Indian official through a phone number on a government website.
Tyagi and Singh—the SDMC and the Forest Department—have been trying to pass the buck for years. The SDMC maintains that because monkeys are wild animals, their control is the responsibility of the forest department. The forest department, in turn, contends that monkeys in cities living on handouts are no longer wild, and therefore do not fall within their purview.
I have heard about a plan to surgically sterilize Delhi macaques. I ask Tyagi for details.
“This is again the subject matter of the chief wildlife warden of Delhi government, Mr. Ishwar Singh.”
Though I know the answer, I ask Tyagi why no fines have been issued for feeding monkeys at the temples.
“As you know, dealings of the monkey issue are religious. I would like to request you to discuss the issue with Mr. Ishwar Singh, chief wildlife warden …”
I finish it for him. “… of Delhi government.”
“Yes. He will apprise you.”
“Feeding is against the law, correct?”
“This is the subject matter of the chief wildlife warden.” DO NOT PRESS REPEATEDLY.
While Tyagi and Singh dicker over whose duty it is, Delhi’s better-to-do residents take matters into their own hands. Commercial buildings and affluent families hire monkey wallahs, men who patrol with leashed langurs. Indian langurs are the formidable black-faced species I saw in Pauri Garhwal and Rajasthan. They’re larger than rhesus macaques, and the macaques keep their distance. A langur sitting on the side of the trail in Bundi was surely the reason I saw no macaques on the way up the hill to the fort. When I looked him in the eye, he raised his upper lip and flashed his canine teeth. Like pushing back a coat to reveal a sidearm, the gesture had the desired effect. I lowered my gaze and moved along.
“The use of langurs is banned.” A contribution from the man in the other chair! He introduces himself. He is one of Tyagi’s veterinarians. “It is illegal.” Because of the Wildlife (Protection) Act. Meera Bhatia told me people in her circle quietly do it anyway. “I don’t know whether we can find out exactly how many langurs the prime minister’s house has, but …”† Then she veered off into a story about a macaque that got inside the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and took to pulling IV needles out of patients’ arms and sucking the glucose like a child with a straw in a pop bottle.
After a crackdown on the monkey wallahs, SDMC hired ten men and trained them to impersonate the calls of the langurs. You may go on the internet to see and hear them at work. It is not true, as one newspaper reported, that they dressed in langur costumes. (It appears to be true, however, that the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport hired a man to dress in a bear costume to scare langurs off the runways and prevent flight delays.)
“And the impersonators? How did that work out?” I’ve started addressing my questions directly to the veterinarian in the other chair.
“The problem is not sorted out. At best, the animals will simply move from one place to another. It is not a permanent solution.” The same can be said for: Avi-Simian Shock Tape, slingshot brigades, plastic windowsill snakes, langur urine (one man told the New York Times that he “had 65 langurs urinating on prominent homes”), and life-size “langur dolls.”
Tyagi removes his reading glasses and puts his full attention on me for the first time since I sat down. “Tell me. What is your solution to handle this situation in India?” I believe he would truly, desperately love to hear a good suggestion, a fresh idea, something, anything, that might appease his vexatious monkey-loving, monkey-hating public.
I tell him about the success they’ve had in some U. S. towns, working to lock down the garbage. Even as I’m saying this, I know that in a city as large and chaotic as Delhi it would be a wasted effort. Tyagi withdraws his gaze. “They are not generally going on garbage. That is dogs.” Dogs, R. B. S. Tyagi will talk about. Stray dogs are rightly his job. Delhi has more dog bites than monkey bites, and the dogs, unlike the monkeys, carry a respectable threat of rabies. But dog attacks don’t sell newspapers the way monkey attacks do. (Nor, for that matter, do the number 1 cause of animal-inflicted deaths in India: snakes. Around forty thousand people die from snakebite every year in India. My Google news alert on snakes and Delhi has delivered but one hit: a video of a macaque making off with a snake charmer’s snake.)
Tyagi replaces his glasses and reaches for a printout on his desk. “This morning I was collecting information about stray dogs in the U.S.” He reads aloud: “ ‘Stray dogs have become one of the most serious public management problems in American cities.’ ” I think of the cities I know, and the many, many problems that plague them.
“Stray dogs?”
He continues reading. “ ‘Packs of wild dogs roam American city streets.’ Is it true?”
The paper references a story in the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald about a problem on a few Native American reservations. Kind of a leap, that. It makes me wonder: To what extent does the media in India overstate the problem, or even fabricate monkey assault stories? Take the Times of India’s “stoning” reference. In a different newspaper’s account, a police investigator stated that the deceased had been sleeping beside a pile of bricks that collapsed on top of him when monkeys jumped onto it. Monkey-inflicted death by stone, yes, but hardly a stoning.
I suspect the press lathers up some of these cases, but macaques are certainly compromising quality of life at some of these housing complexes. A keyword search of “monkeys” on India’s National Consumer Complaint Forum delivers eight-hundred-some pleas to authorities to, as it is frequently phrased, “kindly do the needful.” Here is a typical missive, from Ravi Choudhary of Sector 46, “listing down some of the problems which we face on a daily basis”:
1. Breaking of flower pots
2. Breaking of gate, lamp post
3. Children bite
4. Terror in the residents
5. Breaking of electric cables, [fouling of] water tanks
Temporarily any langur should be allowed to roam in the sector. Thanks.
I ask Tyagi if the statistic of 950 monkey bites per year is accurate.
“Monkey bites are recorded in the hospitals. That is another department.”
Is there any question for which this man has an answer? “Dr. Tyagi, do you like monkeys?”
“Yes, of course. I am a veterinarian.”
“I think you like koalas.”
Tyagi swivels to gaze at his koala photograph. “Cute animals. Very cute. I went to Australia in 2010. I took that photograph.” The memories seem to soothe him. He writes something on a pad, tears off the page, folds it in two, and hands it to me. It feels like a kindness, a small melting of the heart. I unfold the paper. It’s the mobile number for Dr. Ishwar Singh, chief wildlife warden, Delhi government.
Over a span of twelve years, Tyagi’s monkey catchers have delivered 21,000 macaques to an abandoned plaster of Paris mine in the southern reaches of Delhi. It was christened the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, and fiberglass walls were erected. There was a plan to plant fruit trees to feed the simian residents, but that didn’t happen, so truckloads of food are driven in. I picture barren ground packed with dusty monkeys eating rotting produce.
The monkey area is closed to the public. If you ask, you won’t get in, or not without a lot of paperwork or string-pulling. In the autorickshaw that takes me away from the SDMC, I text Nila Bhowmick, the journalist I met: “Feel like a road trip?”
The challenge appeals to her. We decide to just show up and see what we can see.
The staff plays hot potato with us. “You must go across the hall and speak to the forest officer.” “You must see Mrs. Prasad in the natural history center.” “The roads are closed due to mud.” Nila cheerfully keeps at it, walking up to anyone we encounter. Back outside the administrative building, a woman in the parking lot points us in the direction of an elegant-looking man in white: white tunic and breeches, white turban, white mustache looped at the ends like ornamental cursive. He gives his name as Gurji, and he needs a ride out to the plant nursery, which is not far from the monkey area. Just like that, we are in. Nila translates as we drive along.
Gurji works in the nursery, but for three years he had been a macaque caretaker. What Tyagi would not say, Gurji is happy to provide. The city spends 40,000 rupees a day on food for the macaques: apples, corn, cucumbers, cabbage, sprouts, bananas. “Bananas are constant.”
It’s a six-mile drive to the monkey area. The road is deeply rutted and, yes, in fact, muddy. The sanctuary is enormous, beautiful, and wild, with low mesquite trees and bushy acacias. We pass nilgais and spotted deer. It seems like a fine place to be a monkey, though we have seen none yet. Gurji tells Nila he misses working with them.
“They were your friends,” she says.
Gurji laughs. “Monkeys are no one’s friends. They’ll come and take the food. That’s it.”
We pull up beside a simple raised platform—a macaque feeding structure. A half dozen of them perch on the edges, eating corn and cabbage.
The sanctuary walls are poorly designed for keeping in monkeys. They climb them with ease and irritate the people who live nearby. With all the food and room to spare, why do they stray? It’s the usual problem with translocation. An animal is not translocated into a vacuum. It’s set loose in another animal’s territory.
“They fight with the new arrivals,” Gurji says. “They chase them away. The weak ones go.”
We drive Gurji over to the nursery. It’s a single-room structure guarded by a langur. It’s feeding time, corn and cucumber. The langur ignores the cucumber and ravages the corn, kernels spraying from either side of its mouth. Gurji walks with us to a cluster of simple buildings across the road, once a residence colony for the mine workers and now a small village. A burly male macaque darts up the fiberglass wall meant to keep him out. He has a low brow and glowering mien that make me think of Joaquin Phoenix. He doesn’t seem weak. Why would he want to leave the sanctuary?
“They all go in and out,” says Gurji. “In my village, you can’t even eat a roti without a monkey coming and taking it from you.” He shrugs. “They’re monkeys. What can you say?”
Dr. Ishwar Singh answers on the third ring. Asked about the forest department’s plans for macaques in Delhi, he replies, “Laparoscopic sterilization!” He says it with grand flourish, as though introducing a special guest. And then he hangs up. It’s the shortest interview I’ve ever done. I call back. I text. I email. No answer. I am the sperm, and he’s the immunovaccinated egg. All receptors blocked.
I contact my acquaintances at the Wildlife Institute of India. Project scientist Sanath Muliya provides an interesting answer. He knows of no plans for surgical monkey sterilizations in Delhi, but laparoscopic vasectomies and, for the ladies, tubal ligations, have been underway on and off at eight Monkey Sterilization Centres (MSC) in the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Since attaining the status of “pest (undeclared),” in 2006, a total of 150,000 macaques have been tied off, stitched up, and tattooed—with an ID number, I’m guessing, or a check mark, or something. Does 150,000 sound like a lot of monkeys? The forest department doesn’t think so. In March 2013, the chief conservator for the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department sent a memo to MSC staff. “It has been noticed that the pace of monkey sterilization has not been satisfactory.” The staff are directed to step up the pace “to approximately 90–100 monkeys per day in each MSC.”
Photographs of the Himachal Pradesh Monkey Sterilization Centre posted online show two operating tables going at once. Assuming an eight-hour day, that’s six surgeries and tattooings per hour that these surgeons need to be doing. Ten minutes per monkey!
But it wasn’t the veterinarians who were hobbling the pace. The memo orders forestry officials to triple the ranks of monkey catchers, not medical staff. Even with the gussied-up title of Monkey Capturing Team, no one wants the job. Officials next tried recruiting the public at large, placing a 500-rupee bounty on macaques. Pushback ensued. As an activist pointed out to a BBC reporter, “Monkeys will be captured in a crude manner… . Many can get hurt.”
Muliya says the public takes issue even with the vasectomies themselves. “They think it is inhumane.” Plus, the monkeys scratch their incisions and the stitches come out. “That’s what made us pursue PZP as an option,” he wrote to me in an email.
Six months after I return home, the Hindustan Times would announce a new approach. “To control the monkey menace, the Delhi government’s forest department is pinning all its hopes on an injectable contraceptive.” But it wasn’t PZP, or any other vaccine. It was RISUG (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance), a gel injected into the vas deferens to block the sperm’s path. The article quoted an affidavit “filed by Ishwar Singh, the Delhi forest department’s chief wildlife warden … before the Delhi High Court … [stating] that the RISUG is a viable option after three failed attempts to get NGOs to conduct laparoscopic sterilization.” Laparoscopic sterilization! The exclamation point was gone now.
