Since early July, 42 people have been injured by roaming macaques in the western Japanese city of Yamaguchi in attacks of unusual scale that forced local authorities to use hypodermic anesthetic guns to put them to sleep.
Macaques are common in the Japanese archipelago, where they are sometimes considered a nuisance, breaking into houses or robbing crops. Although it is unusual for these little monkeys to attack humans directly, these animals have been scratching or biting children and adults alike in recent weeks.
“The whole of Yamaguchi is surrounded by mountains, so we often see monkeys in it,” a municipality official in the Japanese city told AFP on Monday. However, he noted that “registration of so many attacks in such a short period of time is not uncommon,” adding: “In the beginning, the attacks were only targeted at children and women. But lately, elderly men and adults have also become victims.”
Local authorities have been patrolling since the first attacks on July 8, but so far they have not been able to catch a single macaque. It is still unknown whether the attacks are associated with an aggressive isolated group of monkeys or whether they reflect behavior that has become widespread among these primates.
These incidents made headlines in the Japanese media, which reported numerous testimonies from victims of Yamaguchi residents. “I heard crying on the first floor, so I ran there and saw how the monkey attacked my child,” the head of the family recently told the local newspaper Mainichi.
