Fruit Harvested by Monkeys

Use of Animals for the domestic purpose or agriculture is from the very primitive age. Man, when just started life in nature was exposed to the Apple and the wild animals available in nature. Man-made these animals viz. Horse, Dogs, Cow, Ox, Goat their friends and started using or getting help from them in his day to day working.

We had seen the Monkey performing tricks on the road and there was a story about the monkey and the king. Where the monkey was a domestic servant for the performance of the daily work in the service of the king. At that time there were no trainers or schools for imparting training to these animals as Monkey. Now there is a school giving training for helping the farmers in the field to work as a labourer.

Thousands of monkeys have been taught the trade over the past four decades by a man known as Grandfather Wan in a small village in the north of the country. A pig-tailed macaque yanked at a coconut on a piece of string until it fell to the floor, a small victory for the simian student at a Malaysian school that trains monkeys to harvest fruit for farmers.

For a small fee, people across the country send their macaques to the famed school, where they are put on thin chains like leashes, and trained to clamber up palm trees and pick coconuts.

Over the past four decades, thousands of monkeys have been taught how to harvest fruit by a man known as Grandfather Wan in a small village in the north of Malaysia. 

Teaching monkeys to pick fruit has in the past sparked protests from animal rights groups, who have denounced it as cruel, but Grandfather Wan - real name Wan Ibrahim Wan Mat - insists he only ever treats his charges kindly.

"When they drop the fruits, we show them, love. We stroke them."

When agriculture was first developed, simple hand-held digging sticks and hoes were used in highly fertile areas, such as the banks of the Nile where the annual flood rejuvenates the soil, to create drills (furrows) to plant seeds in. Thousands of years after the nomadic life, people wanted to settle down as they were tired of moving from one place to the other. They observed sprouts of maize kept on the graveyards. Women nurtured the plants from her intuition ton harvest next. Thus women are regarded as the pioneers of agriculture. People started to use fire and digging land by sticks and branches of trees. They started to prepare garden plots to grow small grains.

Once upon a time, there had no communication among the peoples. All people were living on jungle and eat the leaves of tree. There had no cloth to ware. It have been changed to a modern life now. This is the Evolution of man and agriculture. There have some Stages Evaluation. The Evolution of man and agriculture- stages Evaluation are described as The evaluation of agriculture is changed the life style of peoples.

Thousands of monkeys have been taught how to harvest fruit by a man known as Grandfather Wan. He trains southern pig-tailed macaques, a medium-sized monkey found across much of Malaysia, as well as parts of Indonesia and southern Thailand.

They are mostly found in the region's rainforests, but as their natural habitat has been destroyed by logging and human encroachment, the monkeys have increasingly strayed into villages and cities.

Wan Ibrahim first became interested in macaque training in his early 20s when he spotted the creatures climb up coconut palms to pick the fruit.

It was just a hobby to begin with, but as he improved, word of his skills spread and people from far and wide started sending their macaques to him in the small village of Padang Halban, in northern Kelantan state.

Coconuts are big business in tropical Malaysia, which produces some 700 million every year, and the country is home to countless smallholders, some of whom use monkeys to carry out the labour-intensive work of harvesting.

Getting a monkey up to speed as a top-notch coconut picker can take anything from a few days to a month, depending on the animal, Wan Ibrahim said.

But once fully trained, they can pick up to 800 coconuts a day, which he said makes his fee of RM150 for a full course well worth it.

The course has several stages. The first is training a monkey to yank a coconut free that is attached by a piece of string to a wooden fence - aping the action of pulling one of the fruits from a coconut tree.

The creatures are then trained to pull coconuts from a plank of wood raised a few feet above the ground, and the final stage sees them clambering up palm trees to collect the fruit.

Mat Ali Zakaria, a coconut picker and customer from the town of Padang Rengas, more than 300 kilometres away from Padang Halban, praised Mr Wan Ibrahim for his gentle training methods.

"I've seen other people training macaques - sometimes if they don't want to take coconuts, the monkeys are dunked into a river," he said.

Wan Ibrahim's business won't be around forever - he has slowed down since a stroke two years ago and now gets around with a walking stick.

None of his five children is interested in taking over the training centre, but he said there are other monkey trainers in Malaysia who will continue the work once he retires.

Malaysian Animal Welfare Society president Shenaaz Khan said she was not against training macaques as long as it was not cruel, but raised concerns there was insufficient monitoring of the monkeys once they were returned to their owners.

"When you use them as a labour force, they don't have protection. Who's going to look out for them?" she said.