Yuan Yi, a Monkey Walk guide who’s been volunteering with JGIS since 2017, tells me about how she once helped a group of picnickers when monkeys tried to snap up their leftovers. There were also other instances where members of the public broke the rules of the nature reserves and had to be stopped from feeding monkeys, or fishing in the no-fishing zone.
Joe, a Wildlife Ambassador, Monkey Guard and Monkey Walk guide for JGIS, also cites how he will “encounter people talking and laughing very loudly [or] playing music loudly on their portable speakers” on almost every nature walk.
While not a horror story — if anything, it’s a heartbreaking one — our JGIS Primates Team had to take on the task of reuniting a baby monkey with its family after a man harassed the macaque family with a child’s scooter just a few months ago. Luckily, the reunion was a successful one, but the situation could have turned out much worse, with the baby being rejected from the troop, or even killed.