This is a scene that is going to make you laugh and at the same time appreciate the extra mile airport staff has traveled in his line of duty. The premise behind this experiment is simple, langurs (Semnopithecus), a genus of colobine monkey is scared of bear.
Fed up by the ‘monkey business’ of the uninvited langurs in Ahmedabad airport, the authorities came up with a unique plan.
As reported by NDTV, an airport employee in Gujarat’s Sardar Vallabhai Patel International Airport planned to scare away a group of monkeys from the airport operation grounds by dressing as a bear.
In the video shared online, an airport staff, dressed as a bear, was seen chasing away a group of monkeys from the grounds of the airport on Friday.
The airport director, Manoj Gangal, explains
The “experiment” began a week ago, he says, when one staff member wore a bear costume and tried to scare away the monkeys. The experiment was very successful! And they’ve been doing it ever since.
While it may seem like a highly creative solution, this isn’t a completely new solution to manage money menace in India. Earlier in an Uttar Pradesh village, residents dressed up as bears to scare away thousands of monkeys that have been bothering them.
The man behind the bear costume
The employee, identified as Jaldeep Kapdi, a supervisor at the airport says that the costume is effective. “There is an increase in the number of langurs in the area, there are several reports on it too. It becomes a problem for the flight to take off when the langurs come on the runway, which is why this costume is effective,” Jaldeep reportedly said.
This experiment of enacting bear for our langurs is working well for now. But as people who work with these monkeys know that they are highly intelligent animals and it’s not long before they’ll figure out that something is fishy with these bears!
