Interesting stuff, Nepal ko chora. Found this piece about monkeys in Delhi :P ######################## - http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8708756 Delhi's monkey menace Simian agonistes Feb 15th 2007 | DELHI From The Economist print edition The capital's street life under threat VISITORS to Delhi's elegant parliament, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, have long witnessed a tribe of brown rhesus monkeys loitering outside picking each other's fleas—a display of public-spiritedness rare among those inside. Soon, no more. On February 8th the High Court in Delhi ordered its rulers to consider expelling an estimated 6,000 urban monkeys to a reserve outside the city. It could have been worse; the judges ruled against sterilising them. Delicate sensibilities, and the usual administrative incompetence, have made a shambles of efforts to contain the “monkey menace”, as newspapers have labelled it. Victims of Delhi's rapid sprawl, which has subsumed their forest habitats, the monkeys can indeed be irritants. Many locals deem them incarnations of the Hindu monkey-faced God, Hanuman, and so feed them, which has made them demanding. They have been known to terrorise food-sellers, get drunk on stolen whisky and break into public buildings—including the Defence Ministry, which they ransacked one night. Workers next door at the Foreign Ministry contracted jaundice after a monkey drowned in the water-tank. Since then various efforts have been made to remove the monkeys. Several hundred were trapped and released in the forests of neighbouring states, which then refused to accept any more. Three hundred monkeys, which were trapped and destined for the forests of Madhya Pradesh, have since been in legal limbo in a concrete-and-wire enclosure outside Delhi. On February 14th, the Supreme Court ruled that the High Court in Delhi could decide their fate. Animal-rights activists have deplored this enclosure and last month hounded the city's chief monkey-trapper into quitting. A different scheme saw bigger, more aggressive langur monkeys introduced to scare the rhesus monkeys away. This was a fiasco: the terrified animals scattered about the city, doing more damage. The latest idea, to shift the animals to a 100-acre (40-hectare) sanctuary on Delhi's outskirts, is a better bet. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has just banned Delhi's roadside foodstalls—all 300,000 or so of them. The judiciary seems minded to make the city not just a bit more orderly, but much more boring.