HONG KONG, October 29 (RIA Novosti) - Farmers from the small Taiwanese village of Yunlin have been forced to hire fireworks experts to save their harvest from fruit-eating macaques, the China Post newspaper said on Wednesday.
Japanese persimmon orchards have just started to ripen, but are being raided by macaque monkeys. Killing macaques, which are an endangered species in Taiwan, is banned under wildlife protection laws.
To scare the animals away, the farmers have had to hire three firework experts, who fire rockets every 20 minutes from sunrise to sunset, as macaques are only active during daylight hours.
"They are persistent," the newspaper quoted a fireworks expert as saying. "The monkeys do not leave the orchards. They are scared and we can shoo them off, but they stay around, biding their time to begin to attack again and again."
