Tourists are urged to remain alert when visiting known areas of macaque activity, refrain from feeding macaques and maintain a distance of 5m from all macaques, national park administrators said.
The call was made during a seminar on Tuesday hosted by the Taroko National Park Management Center that sought to address the ongoing issue of macaques assaulting tourists who are feeding them.
The seminar, consisting of representatives from different national parks, provided a platform to explore possible strategies to control human-macaque conflicts and foster a working cross-agency partnership, the Taroko National Park Management Center said in a press release.
Photo courtesy of Taroko National Park Headquarters
The parks agreed to put up signs to remind tourists to hide their food and refrain from feeding, touching or provoking the monkeys if they encounter them, it said.
The warnings were primarily based on the center’s policy, first issued in August last year, to mitigate human-macaque conflicts in the Tiansiang (天祥) area.
National Park Service acting director Chen Chen-jung (陳貞蓉) said humans and macaques should stay on parallel lines that never intersect, adding that most causes of conflict were due to food.
Citing Taroko Park as an example, Chen said macaques have often ambushed tourists exiting convenience stores or restaurants in the Tiansiang area for the food the tourists bought.
The Yangmingshan (陽明山) and Shoushan (壽山) areas have often seen contraventions of the no-feeding rule, due to their accessibility to tourists, she said.
Other areas, such as Tataka trail (塔塔加) in Yushan (玉山), the entrance of the Shei-Pa National Park and hiking trails near Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), have also seen macaques seeking out humans for food due to past practices of tourists feeding the monkeys, she said.
The Taroko National Park Management Center said it and other national parks would continue collaborating to promote ecological conservation research and improve existing facilities and services.
They would also continue collaborating on wild animal conservation and environmental education to implement the standing human-nature win-win vision, it added.
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