It Was The Monkeys That Killed Him

You hear the oddest things on the Tube. In a moment of travel resignation, I was using the Northern Line the other day, sandwiched uncomfortably between a hygiene-challenged gentleman of the old school and a twenty-something Vladimir Putin lookalike who was convincing his female companion that he was now totally clean, when just after Charing Cross Road the pleasant seeming WAG-wannabe standing in front of me came out and said it. Given the circumstances, my interest was piqued (an escape from the grimly immediate physical surroundings of an impromptu staging of The Jeremy Kyle Show in which I had apparently found myself). And at first I really had no idea where the conversation with her almost identical friend was going as they clung on to the yellow pole in the central part of the carriage. The rattling, screeching and howling noise of the train combined with the odd 'No!' interrupted the flow and sense, but she was unfolding the story of the unfortunate deputy mayor of Delhi, SS Bajwa who has died of head injuries after a fall from a terrace during an attack by feral Rhesus Macaques. I had been away from newspapers, TV and the radio for a few days so this was all genuinely new to me.

Some hours later, the opportunity to go online revealed a more disturbing context for this peculiar vignette from the subcontinent. As well as being an unfortunate week for Mr Bajwa, who leaves behind a wife and child, it was really an unfortunate week for monkeys as a whole (exposure of monkey criminality aside). A new report from the International Primatological Society and Conservation International has listed 114 primate groups that are on the verge of extinction. Hunting and de-forestation, especially in Asia, are the primary causes for this dire situation. The Golden-Headed Langur, the Horton Plain's Slender Loris, and Miss Waldron's Red Colobus are all among the likely casualties. Even two of man's closest simian relatives, the Cross River Gorilla of Cameroon and the Sumatran Orang-Utang, make the top twenty-five list of endangered apes. Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, outlined starkly the scale of this man-made catastrophe, 'You could fit all the surviving members of these twenty-five species in a single football stadium'. Despite the success of some conservation schemes, one of the report's authors, Eckhard Heymann, argued that the fundamental problems of habitat loss simply increase with each passing year. So, while we are drawn to the outlandish sad end of Mr Bajwa, let's also spare a thought for the plight of our distant relatives.