The hunters’ bounty on green monkeys has been increased from $15 to $25 in a bid to cull the population of the wild animals, officially declared pests responsible for the rampant crop destruction, Minister of Agriculture Indar Weir has announced.
He told Wednesday’s edition of Down to Brasstacks on Voice of Barbados that the government had no intention of taking an unnecessarily heavy-handed approach to address the problem which he said had increased dramatically in recent months.
“We had taken a paper to Cabinet just before I went off to holiday, and the Cabinet did agree that we would start back a programme to deal with the increase of the monkey population in Barbados,” said Weir.
“We have increased the bounty to the hunters, it goes from $15 to $25. You can’t just cull all the monkeys, I want to make that clear. You have to have a programme that also in a very humane way speaks to how we deal with capturing and working with the Barbados Wildlife Reserve.”
Welcoming the news, Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS) James Paul told Barbados TODAY that farmers had been long frustrated by the monkey population’s effect on stocks.
“Extremely good news,” he said. “I think it was too long in coming, too long in coming. It’s going to get more people involved in agriculture. A lot of those people have been frustrated by those monkeys. I know the minister had promised that it would come – at least in that respect he kept his word as far as ensuring that we are going to do something about it. I am very happy to know that the bounty is being increased.”
Hunter Calvin Ifill, who is registered with the Ministry of Agriculture, said: “I think that [increase] would be a great value to a lot of the hunters because hunting is not just about going out there and hunting monkeys. You have firearms to maintain, it’s gas to put in your vehicle, and you also have to maintain your vehicle. So the $10 increase will be muchly welcomed.”
Ifill denied that hunters go out of their way to disturb the monkeys’ natural habitats, saying that they are only called in when the animals cause a significant disruption to crop production and in residential areas.
“From the beginning of the year, farmers and also domestic [homeowners] have been calling for assistance for monkeys because the monkeys don’t stay in the gully, the monkeys tend to traverse where they can get something to eat. A lot of hunters tend to hunt on the residential side rather than the farming side of things, contrary to what a lot of people believe, where they think that hunters get out and go down through the bushes and the gullies looking for monkeys,” he told Barbados TODAY.
“You would find hunters going to residential properties to help people with monkeys, and the thing is, the monkeys are destructive to the point that they are not afraid of females. So if you have a household that has a lot of females in it, the monkeys can be very destructive in challenging females on that property. You invest time and money in building a nice house or having a nice property, and then you can’t enjoy your patio because every morning you have to come and either mop up or wipe down monkey urine and faeces.”
Environmentalists have noted that the iconic monkeys have been sighted more frequently as their traditional habitats are cleared for development while several sugar estates lie fallow.
Taken as pets from their native home in West Africa during the Atlantic Slave Trade by early European settlers and slave traders, green monkeys were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean.
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