‘Protect the monkey’ brigade have it all wrong
These pests known as monkeys are not endangered by any means.
EDITOR – I am a South African who has come home on holiday to see his family after being away from SA for more than seven years.
I find it quite astounding how pathetic the public and local municipalities carry on about these pests called vervet monkeys.
You are all looking at this from the wrong angle. These pests are not endangered by any means. They should be placed on the list of pests next to rats or higher.
They breed like rabbits and destroy anything in their path, including birdlife. Has anyone thought of how many bird species are now endangered since the general public decided that these pests should enjoy protection they do not require or deserve.
Have you people also not seen that we are in times where there are a lot of people out there who are really battling to get by, so they grow vegetables and try keep chickens so that they have a little bit of food for their families.
I have noted a dramatic decrease in the bird life that we used to see in our area and my father’s veggie garden is permanently under attack, to the point that he get’s nothing out of it. I feel the public should be encouraged to shoot monkeys to eradicate them and drive them back into the bush where they should be.
For those fools out there in the local public and municipalities who think these are poor animals in need of protection, then you as a municipality should go around to each home and set up protection in the way of shadecloth, secure green houses over the vegetables and safe chicken runs for the chickens and food that people are growing and keeping to survive the hard times. You should put up electric fencing to prevent the monkeys from being able to enter the properties, supplying some means to those tenants to make life very uncomfortable for the monkeys who are somehow still able to get entry into their properties.
If the municipality or other organisation want to make stupid decisions about what gets protected and continues to misallocate money on pointless exercises like hiring a private investigator to find who is shooting monkeys with airguns, they should be dismissed from their posts. People are shooting at these pests because they are tired of having their gardens and hard work destroyed. They obviously have no other means to get rid of these pests. What do you expect people to do when they are at their wit’s end? Would you prefer they got poisoned?
What would have been a far more sensible route to follow would be to get the national parks involved to relocate these animals to a more appropriate living area. Also why not meet with all our local shopping markets and have an agreement that all there out of date vegetables and other appropriate food products that are about to be dumped, be collected and taken to a central point, like Stainbank Nature Reserve, where it can be dropped off to feed these pests there? This will keep them out of our homes. I am well aware that we humans have taken land away from a lot of different wild animals. However, having the public feed these pests and encourage them to keep coming into our areas, we will only make this problem far worse. The public would not encourage lions to come into our areas for example. A wild animal is a wild animal and they carry diseases that you do not want introduced into domestic living areas. Sooner or later children will be attacked.
MORRIS ROGERS
EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED SOUTH AFRICAN
