Reports say Sikandarpur village in Uttar Pradesh, India have resorted to dressing like bears to scare the monkeys away after numerous complaints to the forest department have yielded no results.
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Helpless villagers dress up like bears to scare away over 2000 monkeys
As state officials continue to ignore calls by rural folks to deal with the invasion of their villages by over 2000 monkeys, the residents have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.
Villagers dress up like beers to scare away over 2000 monkeys
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“We have now started taking turns in wearing the bear costume and roaming around the village,” village head Ram Lalit Verma told the Indo-Asian News Service. “It was a relative who had told me about the idea and it is working.”
Verma explained that villagers donated money to buy three costumes from a make-up artist for 1,700 Indian Rupees ($23.82) each.
After about 150 reports of monkey attacks on Sikandarpur, the residents dressed two villagers in bear costumes to try scaring away the monkeys, and it worked for them.
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The villagers had lost hope in the forest department officials who attributed their lackadaisical attitude towards the monkey invasion to lack of resource, hence the choice to take matters into their own hands.
“Catching a monkey would cost nearly 600 Indian Rupees ($8.41) and last time we got funds was in 2018 when we had called a rescue team from Mathura,” forest officer MN Singh is quoted as saying.
The official claimed that the best his outfit could do for the poor villagers was to help them send the monkeys to the forest after they had caught them.
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Singh hinted of plans to visit Sikandarpur in the coming days to ascertain the potency of their ‘fake bear’ strategy and then suggest it to other villages suffering the monkey invasion.
Good luck to the innovative Sikandarpur residents.
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