A monkey chaser is being sought as Taitung County’s Yanping Township (延平) tries to protect its crops from the year-round pest, Yanping Industrial Tourism Office worker Hsu Hung-wen (許鴻文) said.
The problem is most prevalent at Yanping’s fruit farms, where monkeys ravage the produce as soon as it is ripe, leaving only the fruit that is not sweet or has flaws, Hsu said.
On Wednesday, a pineapple farmer woke up to find bits of fruit scattered all over his farm after a raid by monkeys, Hsu said, adding that so far this season, the farmer has lost half of his 3,000 pineapples to the animals.
Photo: Wang Hsiu-ting, Taipei Times
Taiwanese macaques, the most prevalent primate species in the area, eat almost everything they find on a farm — oranges, pineapples, peaches, papayas and even corn, Hsu said.
Sometimes they take one bite of a fruit and then toss it away if they do not like the taste, he said.
Hsu cited a township official as saying that monkeys not only ravage crops, but also bother farm animals, sometimes jumping on pigs’ backs or seizing chickens and carrying them up a tree.
Over the years, farmers have tried to repel monkeys with firecrackers or slingshots, but such methods have proved ineffective and too time consuming, Hsu said.
So the township is to hire a monkey chaser for a monthly salary of NT$23,000 (US$739), Hsu said, adding that applications opened on Thursday and close on Friday next week.
The worker will be assigned to designated fields, with a focus on the pineapple harvest season from July 17 to Aug. 31, Hsu said.
According to the county government, the monkey population in Taitung is about 30,000.
Estimated farm losses caused by the animals average about NT$100 million per year, it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching