The news are reporting that a bunch of monkeys, a group of rhesus macaques to be precise, invaded a school basketball court at Tsz Wan Shan yesterday:
Monkey business: primates invade Hong Kong basketball court | South China Morning Post
They were eventually chased out by AFCD staff when they captured one of the females, scaring the rest of them back up into the hills. This follows a screed in the letter to the editor column, where the expat author calls for the extermination of the macaques as he regard them little more than vermin.
Rather drastic I think. And it also betrays the ignorance of the author. True, most of the local population of macaques descended from released animals in the pre-ww2 era rather than the natural population (they were released to consume the poisonous plant strychnos, found in the Lion Rock area). However, HK is the natural habitat of these monkeys after all. The city is well within the range where these macaques occur. So one cannot regard them as "exotic" species. Extermination of them is therefore not the solution. The HK government in fact had launched a sterilization program to control the macaque population.
But the larger point to ponder is, why can't we all get along? Isn't it remarkable that in a dense urban city like HK, there are still wildlife to be found? And in close proximity to humans? Can't we devise better ways to manage our co-existence rather than eliminate the other species (i.e. enforce the ban on feeding the monkeys)?