Punjab govt brainwave: Rs 1 crore for a school to train monkeys

The first-of-its-kind monkey school will provide inmates with medical care and good-behaviour training. “In addition to veterinary doctors the centre will have experts and it would be a sort of good manners school for the monkeys,” said a senior official of the Punjab wildlife department.

Minister for Forests and Wildlife Tikshan Sud said the case file has already been sent to the Central Zoo Authority. “We will build a state of the art centre that will have good facilities for monkeys and their treatment,” Sud said.

Officials said rogue monkeys have been running riot in Punjab — especially in the area around Patiala — chasing and attacking residents,injuring them and snatching their belongings. Complaints with civic bodies and Divisional Forest Offices have been pending mainly because there is nowhere the animals can be kept after they are caught.

The site for the new monkey school already has a small zoo run by the

forest department. “This entire area is full of hundreds of monkeys who cause inconvenience to residents,” said a wildlife official. “We have over 65,000 monkeys in Punjab,around a fourth of whom live in and around Patiala,” said another official.

Jasmer Singh,DFO,Wildlife,Patiala,said that once the centre is functional,forest officials in Punjab will be able to catch monkeys from residential areas and send them across so that they can be “taught to be decent and live socially with other monkeys”.

Once a monkey turns rogue,it is difficult to keep it away from humans,Singh explained. “These monkeys cannot stay with other monkeys. They can become violent and attack anyone. So there was a need to set up such a centre at the state level,” he said.