A four-month-old was killed by a monkey that threw the baby from the rooftop of a three-story building in a village located in India's Uttar Pradesh state.
The incident occurred in Dunka Village, located close to Bareilly District.
It happened as Nirdesh Upadhyay and his wife and baby boy were walking on the terrace of their house. The father was carrying the child in his arms. Suddenly, a number of monkeys came from nowhere and attacked the family.
When Nirdesh tried to run toward the stairs, the boy fell from his hands. A monkey immediately grabbed the baby and threw him off the roof.
The baby died on the spot.
Bareilly's Chief Conservator of Forests Lalit Verma said that the incident was reported last Friday and a forest department team was sent to investigate the matter.
The rhesus macaques, generally speaking, are a harmless and peaceful species and live in troops.
As humans generally feed these monkeys, they lose their sense of fear and start attacking humans when they're hungry and sometimes angry, ecology researcher Asmita Sengupta of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment told Reuters.
Often monkey-human encounters have turned tragic.
According to Dailymail.co.uk, a five-year-old girl was killed by monkeys in the village of Bichpuri, in the Bareilly District, in February.
In January, a three-month-old baby named Prince died when he was dragged away by a monkey and thrown into a water tank. The incident occurred in Gadhi Kalanjari in Uttar Pradesh's Baghpat District.
Many Indian states, including Uttar Pradesh, have introduced surgical sterilization for rhesus monkeys, aimed at curbing their ever-increasing population and finding a possible solution to the rising reports of simian violence. However, the measure has proven futile.
In 2019, the Indian government also considered alternate means of population control for the macaques. Immunocontraception is a technique which involves the administration of a vaccine that creates a temporary immune response against a protein or hormone crucial to reproduction, therefore rendering the monkeys infertile.
However, this program met several obstacles and failed to achieve its goal.
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