Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #501

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Booze-fueledMonkeyGoesCrazy, Killing OneManAndInjuring250Others
Alcohol can have some strange effects on humans. If you drink too much, you get a little loopy, and if you make a habit of
it, you may find yourself physically dependant on it. It’s not pretty when it happens to a person, and apparently, that’s also true for some of our relatives in the animal king- dom as well.
A recent report out of India is almost too surreal to believe: A pet monkey that had been raised to drink hard liquor suddenly found itself without a source of alcohol and went on what can only be described as a rampage. The animal injured 250 people and actually kill one man by biting him so severely.
The monkey, named Kalua, was reportedly the pet of a man being described as an “occultist”
who would rou- tinely feed the monkey booze. It’s unclear why the monkey was given high quanti- ties of alcohol but that little detail is secondary to the fact that the mon- key eventually became an alco- holic. He was dependent on the booze to function, and when his owner died he no longer had an avenue to obtain the liquor he
needed.
So, the monkey hit the streets, growing aggres- sive as his body began to crave the booze he had been fed all his life. He attacked indiscriminately, bitting over 250 people during his rampage. One man died as a result of the wounds he sus- tained from the primate.
Now, months after being captured and put in the monkey equiva- lent of a drunk tank, Kalua remains incredibly aggressive toward people. It has been decided by local authorities that rather than release him in the wild and risk him attacking other animals or peo- ple, the monkey will spend the rest of his life in isola- tion at the Kanpur
zoo.
“We kept him in isolation for some months and then shifted him to a separate cage,” Mohd Nasir, a doctor at the zoo, told Gulf News. “There has been no change in his behavior and he remains as aggressive as he was. It has been three years since he was brought here, but now it has been decided
that he will remain in captivity all his life.”
It’s a bizarre and tragic situation. Kalua is just six years old, and some monkeys can live from any- where between 15 years and sev- eral decades, depending on the species and other factors. Kalua is now essentially serving a life sen- tence for his crimes.
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