If you’re ever in New Delhi and think you hear a monkey, don’t assume it’s a monkey. It could be a professional monkey sound imitator.
That’s because humans have been trained to imitate the guttural growls and screams of gray langurs, a type of large ape that can scare away the smaller species that tend to invade city officials’ residences or disrupt state visits.
This weekend, the impersonators take on a new challenge: stop monkeys, who often evade guards by swinging through treetops, from storming into the venues for the Group of 20’s summit of world leaders, the first to take place in India.
The event is important for India on the global stage, and the government doesn’t want monkeys stealing the spotlight.
“We are doing everything we can to keep the monkeys away,” Satish Upadhyay, deputy chairman of the New Delhi Municipal Council, said in an interview. The campaign includes training 40 people to imitate langur sounds and placing life-size cutouts of the animals, which can weigh more than 10 kilograms, around the sites.
Each place has its unique challenges when hosting a large and prestigious event. Meetings such as the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto and the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle were disrupted by protests. Before their turn to host the Olympic Games, Beijing, Paris and Salt Lake City tried to hide poor and homeless residents.
New Delhi also suffers from problems such as air pollution and the reputation of a city that is unsafe for women. Amid the G20 promotional campaign in India, proponents say the city’s poor have been kept hidden.
And then there are the wild monkeys, especially rhesus monkeys.
They are not shy. They steal food and chase pedestrians. They sometimes run buses and subways. They have attacked patients in hospitals, raided the Ministry of Defense and the Prime Minister’s office, and raided the Indian parliament building.
Such antics sometimes have deadly consequences. In an extreme case, a deputy mayor died in 2007 after falling off his balcony while trying to scare away monkeys with a stick.
“The monkeys are mischievous and can end up at your dinner table, in any home in Delhi,” says Abdul Khan, a freelance monkey sound imitator in New Delhi whose uncle once used live monkeys to scare away smaller monkeys. “It doesn’t matter how many security guards you have outside the gate.”
A number of Indian and foreign news outlets kicked off their coverage of the G20 last week with reports of the government’s plans to deter the macaques. Manisha Pande, the editor-in-chief of Newslaundry, an Indian media watchdog, said such reporting is “as clichéd as it gets” and that many Indians were “quite bored of the foreign press playing the same monkey story.”
She said she couldn’t recall a single event or summit in the country ever being disturbed by monkeys.
“That being said, monkeys are known to be a bit of an urban threat when it comes to Delhi and many other cities in South Asia and Southeast Asia, just as seagulls are a threat in any European coastal city,” she said.
Deploying monkey sound mimics during state visits and other important functions is a relatively new tactic in Delhi, and much less aggressive than the city governments used in the past: human monkey hunters and real gray langurs, not to mention slingshots and stones. and stun guns.
In 2012, the national government banned the use of real langurs after activists said the practice amounted to animal cruelty. Most of these langurs were caught from the wild in violation of Indian law, says Valentina Sclafani, a psychologist at the University of Lincoln in Britain who has studied primate behavior.
Another challenge is that in Hinduism, India’s dominant religion, monkeys are seen as representations of a deity, and some people like to feed them as a traditional offering.
So officials in Delhi started looking for other options. Langur voice impersonators, for example, were part of a larger effort to clean up Delhi’s rough edges in the run-up to President Obama’s 2015 state visit.
But does such an imitation actually work?
Emily Bethell, an expert on primate behavior and social cognition at Liverpool John Moores University in Britain, said she found no peer-reviewed study of langur voice mimicry as an effective strategy to macaque population control.
Still, the practice, she said, appears to be based on an understanding of macaque behavior.
“Whether they can mimic those sounds so accurately that a macaque would interpret them as coming from a langur, we can’t know without rigorous scientific testing,” said Dr. Bethell in an email. “However, the macaques may be familiar with humans making these sounds and associate them with threat, which could be enough.”
Dr. Sclafani also expressed cautious optimism about the practice, saying there is some evidence that under certain circumstances, macaques can recognize and respond to langurs’ alarm and territorial calls.
A hypothetical disruption of the G20 could threaten the government’s “carefully built” event management reputation and fuel the political opposition to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party ahead of upcoming state-level elections. says Sanjeev MA, professor of marketing at the G20. the Jaipuria Institute of Management in Lucknow, India, which has been studying crisis communications by Indian officials during the coronavirus pandemic.
Killing monkeys, he added, would upset members of India’s Hindu majority and allow the opposition to question the government’s religious sensibilities.
Mr. Upadhyay, the municipal official, refused a reporter’s request to interview some impersonators. He said their work is part of ongoing research by forestry officials into new ways to deter monkeys.
He expressed confidence in the mimicry’s chances of success at the G20.
“Will it be 100 percent effective?” he said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
