Culling

Culling is the “selective killing of animals to manage their population” (Feng, 2015b). Relocating macaques only displaces the problem (Feng, 2015b) and it is not an easy task as the existing troop in that area has to accept the new member or else it would pose a danger to the macaque that has to be relocated (Wild Singapore, 2009). Hence, culling is used instead to address the human-macaque conflict in Singapore.

History 

  • Massive culling of macaques started in 1970s when a troop of monkeys were seen as a nuisance at the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Sha, et al., 2009b)
  • In 2004, 93 macaques were culled (Mulchand & Tan, 2008)
  • The figured doubled to 206 macaques in 2007 (Mulchand & Tan, 2008)
  • When complaints of macaques peaked in 2013, 570 macaques (approximately 1/3 of the population) were culled (Feng, 2015a)

A survey done by Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (ACRES) showed that only 13% of residents (out of 600) supported culling with 45% sitting on the fence. However, people were skeptical of the results, hinting that more support for culling would be apparent if the survey was done with residents in densely-populated macaque areas (Feng, 2015a).

Method

The Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA)

  1. Loans traps to households for free (Mulchand & Tan, 2008)
  2. External contractors are hired to capture monkeys (Feng, 2013) 

Once the macaques are successfully trapped, they will be put down. Following the culling in 2013, the number of complaints dropped from 1,860 to 750 in 2014 (Feng, 2015a).

Limitations

While culling may seem to be effective in the short term, the decrease in the number of complaints received by governmental agencies might have been due to other measures that have been put in place (Feng, 2015b). 

Culling can eliminate aggressive macaques who are a threat to public safety. However, the monkeys caught in traps are often babies and not the ‘problematic’ ones (Tan, as cited in Tan, 2013). Aggression is used as a compelling reason to cull macaques. While macaques are wild animals and have the ability to hurt people, such cases occur very rarely. Observations of human-macaque interactions in Singapore indicated that there were 2.03 of such interactions per hour, which is much less than monkeys at tourist sites in other countries  (Sha et al., 2009b).  No biting or scratching was observed but 10% of the respondents who were interviewed mentioned that they had experienced such occurrences. Nonetheless, only 8% of human-macaque interactions occurred without any provocation by humans. The rest of the interactions occurred due to food cues (two-thirds), or in retaliation or human provocation (one-third).

More importantly, the size of the macaque population may not be the main reason behind the human-macaque conflict, hence using population measures like culling is not solving the root cause of the problem (Tan, as cited in Tan, 2013). If humans are not willing to change their behaviour, it is likely that the human-macaque conflict will continue to exist.