Herding Monkeys to Paradise

Download or read book Herding Monkeys to Paradise written by John Knight and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-05-27 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the use of monkeys as a tourist attraction in Japan. Monkey parks are popular visitor attractions that display free-ranging troops of Japanese macaques to the paying public. The parks work by manipulating the movements of the monkey troop through the regular provision of food handouts at a fixed site where the monkeys can be easily viewed. This system of management leads to a variety of problems, including proliferating monkey numbers, park-edge crop-raiding, and the sedentarization of the troop. In addition to falling visitor numbers, these problems have led to the closure or fencing in of many parks, calling into question the future of the monkey park as an institution.