Wild Vervet Monkeys Sexually Harrass Women in Kenya

[LostInAnomie]

If you live in the small village of Nachu in Kenya, watch out, because a group of approximately 300 marauding monkeys is out to steal your food, sexually harass your women and attack and kill your livestock! In a truly amazing incidence of interspecies communication, a group of vervet monkeys, Chlorocebus pygerythrus, is using sexual harassment to intimidate women and children, who are responsible for growing maize, potatoes, beans and other crops for their farming community, causing them to lose their main food supply so they now are dependent upon famine relief to survive.

"When we come to chase the monkeys away, we are dressed in trousers and hats, so that we look like men," said Nachu resident Lucy Njeri. "But the monkeys can tell the difference and they don't run away from us and point at our breasts. They just ignore us and continue to steal the crops."

"The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Njeri.

While it was not unusual for the monkeys to harass the women and be less afraid of them than they are of the men, according to the Kenyan Wildlife Service, the service had never before heard of monkeys making sexually explicit gestures as a form of communication to humans. Despite their new problems with the monkeys, it is a criminal offence to harm or kill any of them, so the besieged villagers must figure out a way to outwit the monkeys instead.

http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2007/08/attack_of_the_evil_monkeys_fro.php

[pitohui]

1. you know these vervets are not awfully big

i would prefer not to be grabbed at by any primate of any size but these are little guys

if i had known there was a risk of this i guess i would not have turned down that rabies shot but in the event, while they approach quite closely, no vervet monkey grabbed my boobs or shot me the bird and i would think that the average kenyan woman is quite a bit larger than i am

they DO panhandle, in fact, i have photos somewhere of a mom vervet with baby on the tit boldly panhandling on the side of the road so clearly they do learn human gestures

the ones that worried me were those baboons, if you leave your car open, they are happy to tear it apart like a DEA agent on a drug search, they'll even taste the paper in your books or so we were warned, we never tested it, we always locked up

maybe there's something about this one village, maybe a "bad element" taught these vervets to harass the women?

[LadyAziz]

2. Wow, that's strange

:crazy:

How in the hell did they learn to behave like that?

Those monkeys are lucky cuz in other parts of Africa they'll be someone's lunch or dinner.:)

[pitohui]

3. well they know they are protected in kenya, they ARE bold

all hunting was illegal in kenya from the 1970s to i believe 2005 -- i mean ALL hunting -- and only now, with wildlife recovered to a spectacular degree, was hunting recently legalized on a limited basis

so these vervets are VERY bold

the blue monkeys too are VERY bold

they know how to "work" the tourist crowd anyway, they've pretty sharp upstairs and you know the saying, monkey see, monkey do

i'm thinking some bad egg taught the vervets or at least taught one of them and then that vervet would teach the others

[Ellen Forradalom]

7. They went to a Big Ten college

and learned it in their frat house.

As good an explanation as any....

[treestar]

4. Do the female monkeys also do the harassing?

Or is it just the male monkeys?

:rofl:

[LostInAnomie]

6. Monkeys don't pay attention to sexual mores.

They do what feels right. :P

[pitohui]

9. i dunno but female monkeys are on the front lines of the panhandling

i need to scan my tourist photo of the female vervet with baby on tit who was panhandling in the road in one area

to be honest maybe it was the time of year but to me it seemed like there were many more females and immatures than males at least where we could see them

[treestar]

11. When you say panhandling, what were they doing?

I'm picturing them asking for $$.

[deucemagnet]

5. Look out. The vervets are organized, and they're voting Republican.

:evilgrin:

[Quantess]

8. Great, now I'll have nightmares about leering monkeys.

Very weird.

[Kutjara]

10. Perhaps the villagers could...

...point at the vervet monkeys' genitalia and laugh. The monkeys would develop inferiority complexes and require years of therapy before they'd feel confident enough to emerge from the forest again.