A pig-tailed macaque yanked at a coconut on a piece of string until it fell to the floor, a small victory for the simian student at a Malaysian school that trains monkeys to harvest fruit for farmers.
Thousands of monkeys have been taught the trade over the past four decades by a man known as “Grandfather Wan” in a small village in the north of the country.
For a small fee people across the country send their macaques to the famed school, where they are put on thin chains like leashes, and trained to clamber up palm trees and pick coconuts.
Teaching monkeys to pick fruit has in the past sparked protests from animal rights groups who have denounced it as cruel, but Grandfather Wan — real name Wan Ibrahim Wan Mat — said he only ever treats his charges kindly.
“They are like our children,” said the 63-year-old, as macaques swung about and screeched in a training area consisting of a cluster of palm trees and some dilapidated wooden platforms for them to climb on. “When they drop the fruits, we show them love. We stroke them.”
He trains southern pig-tailed macaques, a medium-sized monkey found across much of Malaysia, as well as parts of Indonesia and southern Thailand.
They are mostly found in the region’s rainforests, but as their natural habitat has been destroyed by logging and human encroachment, the monkeys have increasingly strayed into villages and cities.
Wan Ibrahim first became interested in macaque training in his early 20s, when he spotted the creatures climb up coconut palms to pick the fruit.
It was just a hobby to begin with, but as he improved, word of his skills spread, and people from far and wide started sending their macaques to him in the small village of Padang Halban in northern Kelantan State.
Coconuts are big business in tropical Malaysia, which produces about 700 million every year and the country is home to countless smallholders, some of whom use monkeys to carry out the labor-intensive work of harvesting.
Getting a monkey up to speed as a top-notch coconut picker can take anything from a few days to a month, depending on the animal, Wan Ibrahim said.
However, once fully trained, they can pick up to 800 coconuts a day, which he said makes his fee of 150 ringgit (US$38) for a full course well worth it.
The course has several stages. The first is training a monkey to yank a coconut free that is attached by a piece of string to a wooden fence — aping the action of pulling one of the fruits from a coconut tree.
The creatures are then trained to pull coconuts from a plank of wood raised a few feet above the ground, and the final stage sees them clambering up palm trees to collect the fruit.
Mat Ali Zakaria, a coconut picker and customer from the town of Padang Rengas, more than 300km away from Padang Halban, praised Wan Ibrahim for his gentle training methods.
“I’ve seen other people training macaques — sometimes if they don’t want to take coconuts, the monkeys are dunked into a river,” he said.
Wan Ibrahim’s business would not be around forever — he has slowed down since a stroke two years ago and now gets around with a walking stick.
None of his five children are interested in taking over the training center, but he said there are other monkey trainers in Malaysia who would continue the work once he retires.
Malaysian Animal Welfare Society president Shenaaz Khan said she was not against training macaques as long as it was not cruel, but raised concerns there was insufficient monitoring of the monkeys once they were returned to their owners.
“When you use them as a labor force, they don’t have protection. Who’s going to look out for them?” she said.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
RSS