Then, in March, the final straw: a man was shoved off his moving motorbike by hungry macaques hunting for food, while a woman was knocked over and dislocated her knee.
“The conflict between people and monkeys escalated, we had to act,” Suttipong Kaemtubtim, director of wild animal conservation at the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP), told The Telegraph.
“The root issue was monkey overpopulation, but they were going into houses, stealing from shops, cars, out of people’s hands. They were causing accidents – there was an increase in motorbike incidents related to monkeys. So we had to step in to control the situation.”
In late April, the government announced a three-step peace plan to capture, sterilise and rehouse the majority (though not all) of the macaques. So far, a police “monkey unit” has trapped almost 1,200, using tropical fruit as bait to trick the monkeys into mesh relocation crates.
While the end goal is to release the macaques in a 3,000-acre sanctuary-like space, for now, they’re being taken to large cages dotted across the city. This includes the ‘Monkey Garden’ in Lopburi’s southwest suburbs, where three fully enclosed cages each hold around 300 of the excitable monkeys that went berserk at feeding time.
Catching and transporting the macaques here was no mean feat, said Mr Suttipong, especially as Lopburi’s many street gangs had to be separated.
“There is a class system in monkey society. There’ll be a larger male monkey at the top of each gang who, with his entourage, has the best status. And then younger, strong monkeys can fight to move upwards,” he explained.
“We have to catch the troops within their gangs, and put them each in a different cage to stop them from fighting each other over food and space… they are all very territorial.”
