Sri Lanka executed an throughout the nation demographics Saturday of problem wild animals, consisting of apes and peacocks, in a proposal to organize countermeasures to defend crops, authorities said.
Some 40,000 regional authorities had been launched to depend swine, lorises, peacocks, and apes close to ranches and houses all through a five-minute period on Saturday early morning.
In the north-central space of Anuradhapura, farmer households collected in open areas to depend the pets and videotape them in sheets provided by the farming ministry.
“We are having census during a very short time period to ensure there is no double counting,” ministry authorities Ajith Pushpakumara knowledgeable press reporters within the funding Colombo.
“We are expecting that the results will be about 80 percent accurate. After we have an idea of the number of these animals, we can plan out the next steps to deal with them.”
In Anuradhapura, 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of Colombo, residents had been out early within the areas planning for the demographics.
“We had a very successful count from very enthusiastic participants. They are the farmers who continuously suffer crop damage. Our count was 227 toque monkeys and 65 purple faced langurs,” Chaminda Dissanayake, a farming division politician that carried out the demographics at Anuradhapura’s Mihintale location knowledgeable AFP.
Opposition lawmaker Nalin Bandara criticised the demographics, calling it a “waste of money”.
“This is a complete failure, a waste of money. What about the pests that attack farms at night. They are not being counted,” said Bandara, together with that more moderen trendy applied sciences can have been launched for the checking exercise.
Officials declare larger than a third of crops are ruined by wild pets, consisting of elephants, that are safeguarded by regulation as they’re considered non secular.
While elephants are vital raiders of rice ranches and fruit haciendas, they weren’t counted in Saturday’s demographics.
In 2023, the-then farming priest prompt exporting some 100,000 toque macaques to Chinese zoos, nonetheless the ape service was abandoned complying with demonstrations from ecologists.
Sri Lanka eradicated quite a few sorts from its safeguarded guidelines in 2023, consisting of all 3 of its ape sorts together with peacocks and swines, enabling farmers to eradicate them.
str-aj/asv/mtp
