Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9.2. Feral monkeys feeding on crops.
food. This practice has since been greatly reduced as the lease owners prefer
using the monkeys as a resource (trapped for monkey breeding farms) rather
than shooting them. Today, there is still a fraction of the population that will
eat monkey meat. In the 1980s it was quite common for fancy-fairs (i.e.,
a family event organized by the local community, usually the church, as a
fund-raising event) to sell dishes prepared from game, including deer, wild
pig and monkey. Some old cookbooks of Mauritian cuisine even featured
recipes for cooking monkey meat. However, today, the practice of eating
monkey meat has almost disappeared from Mauritian culture (see Sussman
et al ., Chapter 8).
Although not very common, there are people keeping long-tailed macaques
as pets. In fact, subsection 17 of the Wildlife and National Parks Act of 1993,
specifies that “a person may keep as a pet an individual specimen of any spe-
cies of wildlife as may be prescribed for the purposes of this subsection.”
Long-tailed macaques are usually taken very young from the wild and kept on
a leash or in a cage in the yard of the person. Very often, when a pet macaque
reaches puberty, their behavior changes and they can become aggressive.
Unfortunately, most of the pet owners find that the easiest solution is to release
the long-tail macaques back into nature where they are unable to adapt and
hence live a life of commensalism in close contact with humans.
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