Kindness brings monkeys closer. The city wants distance
Urban Bystander
A longtime Margalla volunteer remembers a family arriving in the hills with desi-ghee parathas brought from their village.
They had brought them specifically for the monkeys.
The volunteer suggested another destination for breakfast.
Why not give the parathas to him instead?
The family laughed.
The joke was accepted. Breakfast remained earmarked for wildlife.
There are easier prohibitions to explain. A cigarette beside dry grass looks dangerous. A plastic bottle on a trail looks like litter. A paratha held towards a monkey looks remarkably like kindness.
That is part of the problem facing the Islamabad Wildlife Management Board. Its instruction is simple. Do not feed wild animals. Repeated feeding encourages rhesus macaques to associate people with food and approach them accordingly. The visitor, meanwhile, has an animal in front of him and breakfast in his hand.
The monkey has the shorter argument.
Another encounter, recounted in recent reporting from Daman-e-Koh, made the point more efficiently. Female students were warned that monkeys had learned to approach people carrying food. They said they had none.
A monkey took a bag. The bag contained sandwiches.
No further clarification was required.
The monkey’s confidence has a dietary basis. A study conducted in 2019-20 on five selected rhesus groups in the Margalla Hills, and published in 2024, found that plants still accounted for 83 per cent of their diet. Provisioned human food made up 14 per cent, with another three per cent coming from scavenging.
The forest was still providing dinner.
Islamabad had begun supplying snacks.
The problem extends beyond the hand offering food. The volunteer has also called for food baskets and other easily accessible food sources around Daman-e-Koh to be removed. Wildlife officials, meanwhile, have called for stronger enforcement of feeding restrictions.
What changes around the feeding spots, besides the advice?
The warning asks people to stop feeding. Easily available food keeps rewarding the animals for approaching. The Board needs the surroundings to support its instruction.
An IWMB wildlife official has said complaints about monkey feeding have been received and that a related matter has reached an Ombudsman.
The monkey has no complaints procedure.
It has memory.
That memory became particularly awkward in 2020. During the Covid lockdown, when visitors suddenly disappeared from the hills, residents of F-6 and F-7 complained about monkeys entering homes in search of food.
From the resident’s side, the animal had entered the neighbourhood. From the monkey’s side, the catering arrangements had changed.
Customer follow-up had begun.
More recently, an IWMB official said some residents around F-6 and F-7 had installed electrical deterrent systems to keep monkeys away from their homes.
On the hill there is the paratha.
At the house there is the wire.
Islamabad would like the monkey to remember the invitation and forget the address.
The visitor offering breakfast and the resident protecting a house need never have met.
The volunteer remembers another family eating along a trail while monkeys watched nearby. He asked them not to offer the animals anything. He persuaded them instead to open their hands and show there was no food.
The monkeys looked.
Then they moved away.
The cheapest boundary in Islamabad had turned out to be an empty hand.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
