Ecoclub Headlines

AP reports that Angkor UNESCO World Heritage site authorities have asked the Ministry of Agriculture to investigate inappropriate feeding and abusive conduct of local vloggers towards monkeys as well as the increased risk of bites for visitors from a vlogging-dependent, aggressive and growing monkey population! During the pandemic many laid-off tourism employees took to creating supposedly 'funny' online videos with monkeys as a way to survive, but apparently these videos became popular and lucrative to the extent that they have continued producing them when tourism returned. As natural monkey habitats are destroyed, monkeys seek food in villages and cities and many become urbanized. Bali temples,  other tourism sites but also whole cities in Asia (and South Africa and Florida) have to cope with aggressive monkeys and are desperately trying a number of management practices ranging from "do not feed the monkeys" awareness campaigns to "feed the monkeys" through creating natural corridors and planting "food islands", to "scaring the monkeys" with virtual fences emitting predator sounds, to culling or sterilizing the monkeys. The only real solution of course would be "do not destroy monkey habitat" but this is more complicated than it sounds. In an unrelated development according to PETA, Cambodia is one of the countries where endangered monkeys are abducted from forests, labeled as captive-bred and exported to US laboratories for experiments.