All means are good to prevent any disruption of the G20 summit, scheduled for early September in New Delhi. Even the most original. About 30 “monkey men” have been deployed in the Indian capital to scare away the rhesus macaques that proliferate there, local authorities announced on Wednesday.
The New Delhi City Council has recruited between 30 and 40 “monkey men” to imitate the cries of langur monkeys, natural enemies of rhesus macaques that have invaded the Indian capital, where the G20 summit will be held on September 9 and 10. “We cannot drive monkeys out of their natural habitat. So we deployed a team to scare away the monkeys” macaques, Satish Upadhyay, deputy chairman of the New Delhi City Council, said on Wednesday.
Langurs silhouettes
“We will deploy a man in each of the hotels where the delegates will be staying, as well as in the places where monkeys have been seen,” he added. Fearing that the monkeys would attack the car convoys of foreign leaders during the G20 summit or that they would devour the floral decorations, the municipality appealed to the forest department to draw up an action plan.
Life-size silhouettes of langur have also been installed in the streets of the Indian capital to scare off primates. For a long time, men patrolled the streets of New Delhi accompanied by trained langurs, but this practice has ended after a court ruled that it was cruel to keep them in captivity.