The macaque scampered down a power pole and scurried past a convenience store, a gold shop and a tailor, before stealing into a Chinese pharmacy. Behind the counter, the monkey snatched several bottles of medicine off the shelf and ran back outside, where it drank a bottle of codeine-laced cough syrup. Several minutes later, the monkey fell asleep on the street. A car swerved around it, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a motorcycle, but severing the thief’s tail.
In Lopburi, 160 kilometres north of Bangkok, the city’s 1,000-plus population of monkeys are both miscreants and mascots. Some locals believe the animals are godsends from Kala, a Hindu divinity who holds sway over time and death, because many of them live around the 10th-century Khmer-style shrine devoted to him. But for most of the city’s residents, the monkeys are nothing more than pests and petty thieves.
The old section of Lopburi, studded with ruins from the Khmer Empire, as well as a 17th-century Siamese palace, is a breeding ground for three different species of macaques—the pigtail, the rhesus and the crab-eating variety. They have lived in the city since the late 17th century, when Lopburi was Siam’s second capital. Some people believe that the monkeys are soldiers of Hanuman, the monkey god and warrior who led simian armies to great victories in the epic Indian tale, the Ramayana.
The monkeys are divided into three different factions: those who live at the Phra Prang Samyod Temple and sleep on its roof; those who roam free around the nearby Phra Karn shrine; and their arch enemies, who loiter on the streets nearby and sleep on the tops of apartments and Chinese-style shop-houses.
The two groups that live around the places of worship largely subsist on handouts from visitors and have it easy. As with other primates like humans, comfort does not necessarily breed content. On the contrary, it often inspires discord and in-fighting. The macaques living on the streets and buildings have to forage for themselves, so they tend to be the worst troublemakers. Living in unhygienic conditions, they are also prone to a great many skin diseases and even leprosy.
All three factions are as territorial as LA gangs. For instance, if a member of the street gang tries to gatecrash the shrine, it is immediately chased away or attacked, and vice-versa.
In attracting foreign tourists and day-tripping Thais, the animals have been a boon for Lopburi’s economy. On any given day, you can watch visitors gawping at the macaque’s high-wire antics or having their photos taken with them at the shrine. The youngest macaques are the naughtiest. Outside the Angkor-era shrine, on a morning gilded with sunlight, Anchana had four or five of them leap on her back. She grabbed a bamboo stick, coaxed them to jump on it and then started swinging them around in circles while pulling monkey faces and cackling. Born in the Year of the Monkey, she has a similarly hyperactive, chatterbox nature. Sensing they had met their mischievous match, the juvenile macaques leapt from the stick and scampered back into the shrine. The monkeys don’t usually bite, but they are notorious for picking pockets and stealing sunglasses and cameras.
As a tribute to the town’s mascots, and a way of fattening local coffers, the authorities prepare a huge buffet of fruit and vegetables for them in late November every year. This wacky tribute often turns into a few-hour food fight between the macaques, who sometimes pelt tourists with their foodstuffs. To prevent this from happening, local authorities have started putting the fruit and veggies in blocks of ice, so that the monkeys have to lick and scrabble their way to the goodies and visitors have some great photo ops with the shrine in the background.
The world’s first Monkey Hospital, located in the city’s zoo, provides first aid and re-training for rogue primates—like the thieving junkie whose tail had to be amputated. The hospital also helps to spin some positive public relations for these victims of bad press, by proving they can be put to more positive uses like helping the blind.
The latter programme, the first of its kind in the world, came about by accident. A local soldier who volunteered at the hospital noticed that when he put a rope around the waist of a three-year-old female macaque named Cindy, she liked to stand upright and lead him around. Manad Vimuktipune, the president of the local branch of the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand (WAR), saw this and thought they might be able to use monkeys as a substitute for seeing-eye dogs.
Cindy, the hospital’s mascot for the programme to help the blind, had been attacked by other members of her pack at the Phra Pang Samyod Temple. “She was almost completely immobilised by bites,” Manad said, shaking his head in dismay. “She didn’t have any energy left to fight them off. So the security guards there brought her to our hospital.”
At first, Cindy was terrified by the walking sticks the blind use, so the trainers had to leave a bamboo stick in her cage. During the training, it was necessary to tap the stick on the ground constantly to reassure her. For test runs, they used the yard at a local school for the blind, so she would not be distracted by the city’s racket.
Sitting behind the hospital’s front desk, in front of a black-and-gold painting showing one monkey pushing another in a wheelchair, Manad conceded that the programme was still in its infancy, but he was encouraged by an organisation in Boston called Helping Hands. Since 1979, the group had trained more than 100 capuchins (a tiny, agile monkey found in South America) and placed them in homes with quadriplegics. The monkeys, after two years of training, could fetch food from the refrigerator, change CDs, and even comb their owner’s hair. Helping Hands now has a waiting list of 500 quadriplegics who want their own capuchins.
One of the main difficulties in training the Lopburi macaques is that “they have short-term memories, so the trainers have to use short verbal commands and repeat them constantly”. As the middle-aged Manad spoke, a young nurse scooped up a two-week-old monkey running around at his feet and fed it milk from a baby bottle. Meanwhile, an older macaque whose back legs were paralysed in a fall from a building propelled itself around on the tiled floor with its arms.
After they trained her for several months at the school for the blind, Cindy passed her first big test by guiding a blind teenager through the city. Since then, she has appeared on national TV in Thailand and put on a command performance for Her Royal Highness Princess Chakri Sirindhorn.
She also became the role model for a small group of orphaned macaques who live at the Lopburi Zoo, where Cindy performs tricks on a daily basis in order to draw visitors and raise desperately needed funds for the programme. The cost of training a monkey for the necessary two years is a minimum of several thousand dollars.
“The monkeys have constant contact with people coming to the zoo, and that’s crucial for them being able to work with the handicapped,” said the beaming Manad, who has been at the helm of the US$45,000-dollar hospital since it opened in December 2003. “It’s also important that they’re orphans and don’t have other family members around to distract them.”
The Monkey Hospital also functions as a kind of rehabilitation centre for wayward macaques. It receives numerous phone calls from irate citizens about monkeys breaking into their homes, stealing their food and even biting them, said the head veterinarian, Juthumas Supanam. When this happens, the hospital uses some of their volunteers—paratroopers from the nearby Royal Thai Airborne base, armed with tranquilliser darts—to track them down. “It’s an exasperating task,” Juthumas said. “They are so agile and clever that they often make monkeys out of their pursuers by pulling the darts out of their flesh and scampering away.” As pack animals with a ferocious loyalty to their kin, the other monkeys, seeing one of their own in trouble, will race in and try to bite the paratroopers with teeth as sharp as broken-glass shards. It often takes ten soldiers to round up just one of them.
To retrain the rogues, Juthamas said, “We talk to them, use a lot of eye contact, and you have to be very patient. We can only keep them here for about a week—any longer and they wouldn’t be able to return to their pack.”
Despite the monkeys’ hyperactivity and penchant for hi-jinks, what bodes wells for the future of the primates-leading-the-blind programme, the veterinarian continued, is that they “are far easier to train than other animals. They display so many human characteristics that they pick up on your emotions very quickly.”
Repeat offenders—namely, the more temperamental and aggressive macaques—who do not respond to training, are castrated. About 50 per cent of the time, this calms them down. Together with the male orangutans at the nearby zoo, they are taught how to use pieces of watermelon, punctured with holes, as sex objects.
Behind the hospital’s front desk are three rooms full of different primates in cages; out in the back are several bigger cages. For the full-time staff of three, much of their workday is spent caring for the maimed and the wounded. A three-year-old macaque had gone blind in one eye because of a rock from a child’s slingshot. “It hates children and women,” Manad said. Another monkey was electrocuted on a power-line and they had to amputate its right arm. As if still in shock, it sat there on a tree stump, looking forlorn and almost motionless. Yet another monkey, along with four of its friends, tried to hitch a ride on a train bound for Chiang Mai, some 500 kilometres north. The others returned home but this one got lost in a neighbouring province and was brought back to the hospital. Most of the other ‘patients’ had been involved in car accidents or taken tumbles off buildings.
Sitting in the biggest cage was a baby orangutan named Joi. Like a child craving affection and attention, he kept reaching through the bars in the cage, trying to touch and shake hands with every visitor who entered the room. His palms were black, but they felt like leather and looked human. The staff was teaching him tricks for the special show at the zoo, such as riding a tricycle, throwing his arms into the air and how to balance a grape on his nose before letting it roll down into his mouth. Demeaning, yes, but certainly preferable to being hunted down in his native Sumatra, where orangutans (the only great apes indigenous to Asia) are a nearly extinct species.
Before we left the room, Manad squatted down beside the cage. A big grin illuminated his face as Joi gave him a kiss on the cheek. Anchana laughed and knelt down beside the cage. Joi gave her a kiss, too.
On Manad’s desk in his office were wallet-size calendars showing the Chinese ‘Buddha of Wealth’ with a monkey sitting on his shoulder. For Thais and Chinese, the monkey is an auspicious sign auguring a year of great, predominantly positive changes. That was certainly true at the Monkey Hospital, where they initiated a fund-raising drive aimed at people born in the Year of the Monkey. The donations went towards a facility to care for elderly and injured primates. The plan was a prelude, Manad said, to building a massive dome enclosing a jungle-like environment, where they can move all of the city’s macaques to in the future.
Thumbing through a photo album, Manad explained how Cindy had now been trained to clean up garbage and fetch food for her blind master. One photo showed the macaque walking a blind teenager across a street in front of the Phra Prang Samyod temple.
Buddhist compassion is the soul of the hospital’s philosophy and plans of action. Also depicted in the album and promotional pamphlets is one of the main benefactors for the self-funded hospital. Phra Khru Udom Prachthorn, the elderly abbot of the province’s famous Wat Phra Baht Num Phru, is well-known across Asia for his work with the temple’s hospice for AIDS patients. Back in the early 1990s, when other monks and even family members were ostracising those infected with HIV or full-blown AIDS, the abbot set up a special area in his temple and arranged for medical personnel and volunteers to care for the dying.
The hospice is still running, but now the abbot also donates medical supplies to the Monkey Hospital every month. When one of the macaques at the hospital dies, or a local brings in one that has passed away, the abbot presides over a special cremation ceremony at the hospital. Like at a person’s funeral, he chants Buddhist and Pali mantras to wish the creature a safe and speedy trip into its next life. After it has been cremated, the ashes are put in an urn and buried in the hospital’s special graveyard for simians.
“Some Thais believe that monkeys will become humans in their next reincarnation,” Manad explained. “But the abbot also says that in Buddhism you must make merit and do good deeds for everyone—the rich, the poor and animals, too.”