Durban - Schools in Durban are being plagued by monkeys that are after pupils’ lunches, with a 12-year-old Clifton boy bitten on the thigh this week when a monkey went after his hot chips.
The school has now armed teachers with water pistols, and younger pupils are eating indoors to protect them from the marauding primates.
Clifton School’s executive headmaster, Brian Mitchell, said a monkey recently scratched a pupil to get his food.
In another case one grabbed a child’s lunch out of his hands.
In the latest incident pupil Luke Ashton was cornered by the troop and, when he tried to move away, he was bitten.
“One of them just grabbed my leg and bit me. I dropped the chips and ran,” he said from his Morningside home on Wednesday.
The boy received several injections for rabies.
Mitchell said the school had “monkey proof” bins to prevent monkeys from raiding them.
“We are trying to avoid lunch being taken unnecessarily out to open areas,” he said.
“We tried feeding stations, but they didn’t work because the troop increased and no one can monitor the stations during holidays.”
Manor Gardens Primary School principal Carol Lottering said troops visited the school frequently in winter.
“The children are calm, accept their presence and find them amusing, especially the younger children; however, they become wary when a monkey is bold enough to come down to ground level from the trees or roof and get too close,” she said.
The school has indigenous plants and trees growing within its boundary for the monkeys.
Lottering said pupils respected the monkeys and understood that the land was their “ancestral feeding territory” and that they were looking for food.
At Danville Park Girls’ High School, where monkeys were also a problem,
the school had planted fruit trees to lure the creatures away from the area where pupils sat at break time, spokeswoman Brenda Ballack said.
On Wednesday Jean Senogles of Primates Africa gave a public lecture on monkeys at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Westville campus.
People needed to be calm, step back and avoid making eye contact when monkeys entered their homes, she advised.
“If they feel threatened then they’ll jump around and there will be chaos.”
Senogles explained that the adult monkeys often sent the male teenagers into a house first.
“The teenagers will then call the older males if the coast is clear,” she said.
She suggested that people install burglar guards in their kitchen windows and doors to stop the troops from getting in.
Two years ago there was a public outcry when students at UKZN beat a monkey to death.
Len Mzimela, of UKZN, welcomed the idea of feeding stations, saying they would keep monkeys away from the students’ rooms.
“If people have food they don’t want, we will suggest taking it to these stations,” he said. - The Mercury
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