The next 15 megacities #10: As Malaysia’s ever-expanding capital swallows up their rainforest habitat, the macaques are turning to guerrilla warfare
by Jamie Fullerton in Kuala LumpurThe gang stop and stare, attention spiked by our car doors slamming. Ten pairs of eyes flit between our backpacks and our faces. Is it worth mugging us? Do our bags contain bananas or useless, inedible wallets and cameras? The monkeys of Kuala Lumpur’s Ampang district decide against it and head further down the road in the hunt for victims. The morning joggers here run with sticks.“Twenty years ago this was jungle,” says Viswa Hattan, an accountant jogging in the area. Gated high-rises loom ahead of us, the roads leading to them flanked by forest too dense to enter without machetes. Four macaques, babies clinging to their chests, loiter on a metal road barrier uphill from a construction site. “This was their area,” says Hattan as a nearby male macaque begins vigorously masturbating. “We’ve taken it from them.”
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ShowBy 2035 another 15 cities will have populations above 10 million, according to the latest United Nations projections, taking the total number of megacities to 48.
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We'll also be in Chengdu, Dar es Salaam, Nanjing, Ahmedabad, Surat, Baghdad, Kuala Lumpur, Xi'an, Seoul, Wuhan and London.
Read more from the next 15 megacities series here.
The Malaysian capital’s dramatic urban expansion over the past 30 years has shunted much wildlife, including elephants and tigers, from its boundaries. The long-tailed macaques, though, have stayed, with the city’s growing human population providing them with a tempting source of thrown-away food.
In 1980 the (human) population of Kuala Lumpur was less than 1 million; it is now estimated at 7.6 million, and United Nations projections suggest it will surpass 10 million by 2032. While some of that growth has been in the central city zone, in massive structures such as the 90s-built Petronas Towers, the most rampant expansion has been at the outskirts of the city and in the surrounding lush forest.
As the city eats into the forest, the relationship between human and monkey populations has become increasingly complicated. Photographs: Rahman Roslan/Dokumen Studio/the Guardian/sitriel/Getty Images/
As Kuala Lumpur eats up more and more forest, the relationship between its human residents and its monkey population has become ever more complicated. In areas like Ampang, a 15-minute drive from the city centre, macaques break into houses and locals use firecrackers to scare them off. Or, occasionally, to feed to them, with predictably explosive results.
At suburban campuses such as that of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), complaints of messy monkey bin raids are rife. “They chase lecturers to the toilets,” says Prof Siti Aminah Osman, a deputy dean, as she stifles a laugh. In 2015 students mixed shrimp paste, spicy chilli and peanuts to feed the monkeys, to repel them. Now staff are working on “anti-monkey bins” with heavy lids.
Opened in 1970, UKM’s campus is 70% forest area. Endangered flora has been built around and monkeys clamber trees overlooking faculty buildings. A 2014 study found that fewer than 10% of UKM students favoured the monkeys’ presence on campus, but in other peripheral areas of the city the creatures are seen as pals, not pests.
In KL Forest Eco Park, a slab of city-centre rainforest protected as a reserve since 1906, the macaque population is celebrated via cartoons on information boards. At Batu Caves, a popular Hindu temple site in north Kuala Lumpur, monkeys probably attract more tourists than the site’s enormous gold-painted statues. The caves back on to jungle, and the macaques crowd the area’s garishly painted staircase, swiping bags and creating top content for vloggers.
Sethu Pathy, Batu Caves’ secretary, says the monkeys here rely on tourists for food, seemingly abandoning jungle foraging for a diet of chewing gum, stolen flower necklaces and hurled fruit. He supports his claim by lobbing bananas on the ground, causing a monkey melee before a macaque tips over a full cup of coffee left on a table. On the stairs, a monkey scoops its hand into a splatter pool of brown human vomit, then licks it clean.
“Now we can’t see elephants or tigers in this district,” says Pathy, as the banana supply ends and the monkeys move off to explore nearby wheelie bins. “Day by day, land is being cleared for housing and factories. Natural habitats have been disposed of, but monkeys are still around. We occupied their habitat.”
It is not all happy monkey families in the caves. Pathy says locals complain about the macaques stealing from them, and that eight years ago the Malaysian government’s wildlife department relocated many monkeys from the site to the forest.
Some of Kuala Lumpur’s growth has been in the city’s central zone, but the most rampant development has been on its outskirts. Photograph: Hafiez Razali/Alamy
Around that time the department, reacting to complaints from the public about macaques across the peninsula, got tough. More than 57,000 long-tailed macaques were culled in Malaysia in 2010 – double the number from the year before. The figure rose above 97,000 in 2012, prompting a backlash from animal rights groups who claimed monkeys were sometimes shot out of trees, or captured in cages before being shot.
The department responded that culling was “to protect human safety [and] reduce economic losses due to damage done by wildlife to commercial crops and property. We have to see the bigger picture rather than just focusing on the numbers.”
With an average of 3,800 complaints from the public about long-tailed macaques made nationwide every year, the wildlife department’s culls have continued, with up to 70,000 of the animals killed annually between 2013 and 2016. The department declined to speak to the Guardian but Ahmad Ismail, a biology professor at Universiti Putra Malaysia and president of the Malaysian Nature Society, says culling has been reduced over the past couple of years.
He believes the authorities are shifting focus from culling to relocating monkeys, saying: “I think they stopped [mass] culling and we encourage that – as a naturalist I prefer them to catch and move monkeys.”
At Batu Caves, a popular Hindu temple site, monkeys are a major tourist draw. Photographs: Rahman Roslan/Dokumen Studio/the Guardian/Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Getty
Animal rights groups such as Sahabat Alam Malaysia have called for monkeys to be sterilised rather than culled, but although the wildlife department has experimented with castrating macaques, mass sterilisation would be very expensive. Ismail believes that focusing efforts on educating humans about interacting with monkeys is the most realistic way of reducing conflict between the species.
Organisations including the Malaysia Nature Society already organise talks in schools about behaving around monkeys. Prof Badrul Munir of the UKM’s School of Environmental and Natural Resource Sciences says that if enough people refrain from feeding macaques where they congregate, the snack association eventually fades and they harass humans less.
“In Penang Botanical Gardens, they had problems with macaques chasing people,” he says. “They put signs up [telling people not to feed them] and now macaques are not a problem there.”
Whether monkey handouts decline or not, with Kuala Lumpur’s population due to surpass 10 million within 15 years, its human and its monkey residents look likely to have to share more and more living space. Many people in Malaysia are hoping for a future in which slightly fewer monkeys chase lecturers into toilet blocks, harass joggers and steal confidential military documents from postmen.
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