On the path to the summit of Mount Emei in southwest China's
Sichuan Province, visitors can spot monkeys pestering tourists for
food.
"Numbered more than 1,200, the monkeys on Mount Emei are known
for extorting food out of tourists," said Jia Xiaobing, a monkey
keeper on Mount Emei.
"But many of them are in poor health because tourists have given
them too much rich food with high sugar and salt content," he told
China Daily.
Many of the monkeys have become so fat that there was a popular
local saying several years ago that "old women on Emei can climb
trees more quickly than monkeys, and the fat monkeys on Mount Emei
are like pigs."
"What's worse, many of them suffer from hypertension and
diabetes," said Wu Jian, an official with the Marketing Department
of the Mount Emei Management Committee.
The monkeys on Mount Emei are Tibetan macaques, a kind of woolly
monkey named after a French zoologist. An adult Tibetan macaque
usually weighs about 25 kilograms, but on Emei, one weighed 45
kilograms when the Mount Emei Management Committee started helping
them slim in 2003.
The committee forbids tourists to feed monkeys in the reserve
with their own food. Instead, they can spend 2 yuan (26 cents)
buying a small pack of corn or peanuts from keepers in the
reserve.
"Thanks to publicity, an increasing number of tourists know the
plight of the monkeys and no longer feed them with their own food,"
Jia said.
The result is encouraging. Feng Qingchuan, deputy chief of the
committee, says most of the monkeys in the reserve now weigh around
30 kilograms.
The monkeys on Mount Emei live in groups of 15 to 60.
Led by a monkey king, who has all the female monkeys as his
spouses, a group lives in a certain territory and fights off
intruders from any other group.
"To protect their sphere of activity, two rival groups will
fight and both suffer from serious injuries," said Hao Jian, a
producer for Sichuan Television who has been observing the monkeys
for about 10 years.
The monkey king changes every four to five years.
"When a king is too old to fulfil the task of reproduction and
to lead the group," Hao said, "he is replaced by another strong
male monkey."
(China Daily January 9, 2007)
