Wednesday 28 November 2012

That'll teach them

From The Daily Mail:

Almost half of Gibraltar’s famous monkeys could be shipped off the Rock as they are considered 'fearless' of humans.

Although friendly, charming and inquisitive, the wild Barbary Macaques are increasingly running riot through the town’s streets.

"They’ve lost their fear of humans and regard them as a source of rich food," said Gibraltar’s Environment Minister Dr John Cortes.


That is probably one of the most self-defeating plans ever.

If they quietly kidnap half the monkeys and ship them abroad, the remaining monkeys will soon get over it and will then merrily continue pestering people for food, and on a per-monkey basis, will be given even more food. The remaining monkeys might even get the sympathy vote.

If the underlying issue is that the monkeys have become "fearless" then what they ought to do is to wait until there's a pack of them and then simply shoot a few of them at random, repeat this a few times until they've learned their lesson, job done.

3 comments:

Macheath said...

I'm confused; is this of your seamless conflations cleverly satirising the benefit-dependent feral youth of our cities or is it just about monkeys?

Mark Wadsworth said...

McH, the latter.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, good point. Or more accurately "primates", which is an anagram of "trim apes".