Monkeys called in to scare, er, monkeys at Commonwealtwealth Games........
Langurs monkeys (pictured) have been called in to keep smaller local monkeys at bay. Photo: AP
Source: News Limited
COMMONWEALTH Games officials in Delhi have stopped monkeying around when it comes to rogue animals.
They've sent in the snake wranglers - hired big monkeys to scare off the little monkeys - and issued a "shoot on sight" edict for wild dogs.
That just leaves the cows, but as they are considered holy, there's not too much that can be done about them.
Concerned that bands of rogue monkeys might invade VIP areas (including the much maligned athletes village) the organisers have called in a crack team of langurs to keep their smaller, shorter-tailed cousins at bay.
Langurs are larger than the wild monkeys that roam Delhi and it is said they can scare the skin off a banana.
The New Delhi Municipal Council has 10 langur handlers on fullltime staff to keep the wild monkeys in their place, but with the Games just around the corner they've sent for reinforcements. There are now 38 langurs on the job, with half a dozen sent in to clean out the athletes village.
So that's the cobra and monkeys taken care of, but of course there is the risk that the langurs sent in to frighten off the monkeys might get to like the athletes village themselves and so something will have to found to scare them off.
Maybe a cobra ...
As for the elephant crisis, tourists should not fear. The beast at the centre of that shemozzle is only a couple of centimetres tall and about 15,000 kilometres away from Delhi in a game park near Durban.
And that's the trouble. Indian tourist officials yesterday published a full page colour advertisement advising international visitors to the Games of all the wonderful sights they could enjoy around Delhi. One attraction was looking at an Indian elephant. Unfortunately the picture used was of an African elephant.
For the red-faced Commonwealth Games officials, it is just another embarrassment in what is fast becoming a sequel to the George Orwell classic
Animal Farm.
It all started when a snake catcher was called after the South Africans moved into their quarters at the athletes village and found a cobra.
To which tourists here might have said, "lucky you". After all, the sight of a snake charmer piping a cobra out of a basket in the Old Delhi section of the city is a much sought after attraction. Or it was, before officials decided to clean them all out a few months ago.
They issued a similar order about the thousands of stray dogs that also infest the area. A quick wander through the narrow streets and alleyways of Old Delhi yesterday suggested that officials have been a lot more successful getting rid of the snakes than they have of the dogs.
Yesterday there were unconfirmed reports that, very early one morning, a foreign journalist had spotted a person asleep on a busy road next to an equally comatose cow - the reasoning being that the man knew the traffic wouldn't bother him because no-one would drive into a cow (our theory is that it was the journalist asleep on the street and the cow he saw was actually a pink elephant).
Other animals we spotted on our travels were two pigs drinking out of a fetid stream next to a railway line, and a family of squirrels running up and down a drainpipe in Old Delhi
