- An alcoholic monkey attacked more than 200 people when his supply of alcohol was cut off.
- The attacks resulted in many bites and one fatality after the monkey bit a man severely.
- The monkey, named Kalua, will now spend the rest of his life in isolated captivity due to his aggressive nature.
Alcohol can have some strange effects on humans. If you drink too much, you get a little loopy, and if you make a habit of it, you may find yourself physically dependant on it. It’s not pretty when it happens to a person, and apparently, that’s also true for some of our relatives in the animal kingdom as well.
A recent report out of India is almost too surreal to believe: A pet monkey that had been raised to drink hard liquor suddenly found itself without a source of alcohol and went on what can only be described as a rampage. The animal injured 250 people and actually kill one man by biting him so severely.
The monkey, named Kalua, was reportedly the pet of a man being described as an “occultist” who would routinely feed the monkey booze. It’s unclear why the monkey was given high quantities of alcohol but that little detail is secondary to the fact that the money eventually became an alcoholic. He was dependent on the booze to function, and when his owner died he no longer had an avenue to obtain the liquor he needed.
So, the monkey hit the streets, growing aggressive as his body began to crave the booze he had been fed all his life. He attacked indiscriminately, bitting over 250 people during his rampage. One man died as a result of the wounds he sustained from the primate.
Now, months after being captured and put in the monkey equivalent of a drunk tank, Kalua remains incredibly aggressive toward people. It has been decided by local authorities that rather than release him in the wild and risk him attacking other animals or people, the monkey will spend the rest of his life in isolation at the Kanpur zoo.
“We kept him in isolation for some months and then shifted him to a separate cage,” Mohd Nasir, a doctor at the zoo, told Gulf News. “There has been no change in his behavior and he remains as aggressive as he was. It has been three years since he was brought here, but now it has been decided that he will remain in captivity all his life.”
It’s a bizarre and tragic situation. Kalua is just six years old, and some monkeys can live from anywhere between 15 years and several decades, depending on the species and other factors. Kalua is now essentially serving a life sentence for his crimes.
