Environmental Talk

“Here we come … walkin’ down the street … we get the funniest looks ….”

We’ve got it pretty good here in the United States.

Sure, we can complain about taxes, rush hour commutes and reality TV. We can be disgruntled with politics, religion and the ever-decreasing size of airline snack packs.

But at least we’re not subject to random monkey attacks.

Over in India, they’re having a major problem with rampaging primates. And they don’t even get the WWE on cable. The weird thing is that the problem is not in some remote village in the jungle, but in the capital city of New Delhi.

It seems there are hundreds of thousands of chimps roaming all over the city. Before you jump (swing?) to the conclusion that Keeping Up with The Kardashians is filming over in Asia, you should know that monkeys have long been a problem in India’s capital city because of religious and environmental concerns.

Devout Hindus view the monkeys as “an incarnation of Hanuman, the monkey god who symbolizes strength.” Environmentalists view them as a part of Nature, the goddess who symbolizes power and government grants.

Both groups maintain that killing the marauding monkeys is unacceptable.

Animal control officials “often use langurs, which are bigger and fiercer monkeys, to scare away the smaller macaques or drive them into cages.”

This is a lot like using Dick Cheney to get rid of Dan Quayle. I’m not sure it really solves the underlying problem.

The recent death of the deputy mayor of New Delhi has been attributed to monkeys. According to his family, “he was on his balcony reading a newspaper when four monkeys appeared. As he waved a stick to scare them away, he tumbled over the edge and died in hospital from head injuries.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in a small cemetery in the Galapagos, Charles Darwin rolled over.

All I’m saying is, it seems a bit of a stretch to blame this guy’s death totally on the monkeys.

Marauding Monkees were once a problem in America…
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According to Beitbart News,

In the latest incident in Delhi’s low-income Shastri Park area, residents reported the monkeys appeared late Saturday and rampaged for hours.

“I was talking to someone at my door at around 11 pm when a monkey appeared,” Naseema, who goes by one name, told the Times of India. “As I moved inside, the monkey followed and sank its teeth in my baby’s leg.”

This should be a lesson to all of us. We’re not defined so much by our differences as by the experiences we share.

In India, they have monkeys coming to the door and biting children; here in the States we have to deal with Jehovah’s Witnesses.

You say “po-tay-to,” I say “po-tah-to.”

This all goes to prove there are both positives and negatives to coexisting with nature.

On the plus side, I suppose it could create a demand for a sequel to Planet of the Apes.

On the other hand, I think my chances of getting someone at tech support who speaks English just went down.

global warming, climate change, Kim Kardashian, hot monkey love, chimps, gorillas in the mist, Hindus, environmentalists, government grants, Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney