Performing monkeys in Bangladesh: Monkey acquisition, rearing practices and human-monkey interactions

The study on performing monkeys has been conducted at the largest monkey performer’s village at Kashipur of Jhenaidah district between August 2012 and June 2014. Field observations along with a pre-designed questionnaire survey were conducted among the 228 monkey performers with their families. This study revealed about 5000 performing monkeys which were trained to perform in road-side gatherings or street show to earn their livelihoods in this community. Rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) was the mostly used species (88%) followed by Pig-tailed macaque (Macaca leonina) which is 9% and Assamese macaque (Macaca assamensis) consists of 3%. Among six age-sex categories, adult male was used widely (54.15%) followed by adult female (22.93%) and sub-adult male (10.24%) for performance. Monkey performers catch monkey from the wild. The number of monkey individuals owned by each family varied from 1 to 6 with the mean 1.79 ± 1.02. During the harsh training procedure many monkeys (n=6) could not survive. Monkey performers and their family members have a frequent contact with the monkeys during handling, sharing food and training with monkey performance. As a result, monkey owners (42.5%) were bitten and the children (11.5%) were bitten as well while play with their monkeys. Most of the monkey performers (97.8%) did not take care of the wound even did not wash the wound after bitten which can increase the risk of bidirectional disease transmission. published by the Journal of Biodiversity and Environmental Sciences (JBES)