
A city government in Osaka Prefecture is expected to ban tourists from feeding Japanese macaques in a bid to dampen the ardor of the well-nourished and consequently fecund monkeys and slow down the excessive increase in their ranks. The Minoo municipal government also is expected to enact an ordinance to impose fines of up to 10,000 yen on people who feed the monkeys living around the Minoo-Otaki waterfall. While the Minoo monkeys are designated by the central government as a protected species, their number has grown to about 600--about three times what is considered a suitable figure...Gorging themselves on sweets, fruit and other treats offered by tourists the monkeys are so well fed that they are capable of reproducing once a year rather than biannually, which is the norm. The city even started giving female monkeys bananas laced with contraceptives in 2003, but it began looking at imposing the ordinance after this experiment proved ineffective...more...