A Village In India Is Painting Tiger Stripes On Their Dogs To Keep Crop-Eating Monkeys Away

Kate12/04/2019 8:04 PM

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Here in the US if you grow any sort of fruit or veggie you've got all sorts of small rodents & bugs to worry about, but thankfully monkeys aren't one of those things. In India they've become such a problem that some farmers have even been forced to switch to herbs instead or quit altogether.

For years, farmers have fought a losing battle with increasing numbers of the red-faced rhesus macaques. The animals invade farms in several northern Indian states, searching for food and destroying crops worth millions of dollars.
Many have given up on farming because of the monkey problem. Officials estimate that 40 percent of the farmland in the area is unplanted.

As for the new tiger-dog (doger? diger? tog?) plan in this war on plants... From Fox News:

The farmer, identified as Srikanth Gowda, said he has been able to protect his coffee crop from monkeys by painting his pet dog Bulbul with black stripes, an Indian news outlet reports.
“I now take Bulbul to the fields twice a day -- in the morning and evening,” Gowda told Asian News International in a report Monday. “I have seen them running away at the sight of the dog. The monkeys now refrain from entering my plantations.”

Pretty ingenious and, Ah… Oh.. Apparently this is not new and has been a thing. But I refuse to start reporting on real news, Angry Buddha.

According to the Bangalore Mirror in 2016:

The tiger/dog [above] is the handiwork of Nagaraj Mestha, a 30-year-old mechanical engineering diploma holder. He painted his dog in tiger’s stripes not to fulfill any artistic whim, but to deter monkeys that raided his fields.

Apparently the monkeys were chowing down on all the coconuts & peppers around his family's six-acre farm, so he whipped out some dark hair dye & painted stripes on his pup, Wag. It actually kept the monkeys at bay and soon after others in his village (Shiroor village, Kundapur) started asking for Mestha to do the same for their own pets.

Again, yeah, that's smart & all, India, but here in the USA we dye our dogs for much more important reasons.