A monkey drive is an operation where large numbers of wild

monkey Monkey is a common name that may refer to most mammals of the infraorder Simiiformes, also known as the simians. Traditionally, all animals in the group now known as simians are counted as monkeys except the apes, which constitutes an incom ...

s are rounded up and killed in order to protect

agriculture Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled peop ...

such as crops, planted

rice Rice is the seed of the grass species '' Oryza sativa'' (Asian rice) or less commonly '' Oryza glaberrima'' (African rice). The name wild rice is usually used for species of the genera '' Zizania'' and ''Porteresia'', both wild and domestica ...

banana A banana is an elongated, edible fruit – botanically a berry (botany), berry – produced by several kinds of large herbaceous flowering plants in the genus ''Musa (genus), Musa''. In some countries, Cooking banana, bananas used for ...

and

citrus ''Citrus'' is a genus of flowering trees and shrubs in the rue family, Rutaceae. Plants in the genus produce citrus fruits, including important crops such as oranges, lemons, grapefruits, pomelos, and limes. The genus ''Citrus'' is nati ...

fruit trees. Monkey drives have been reported in

Sierra Leone Sierra Leone,)]. officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea surrounds the northern half of the nation. Covering a total area of , Sierra ...

, where they were supported by the government. In 1965,

Gerald Durrell Gerald Malcolm Durrell, (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995) was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservation movement, conservationist, and television presenter. He founded the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo o ...

organised a monkey drive in

during a collecting mission for

Jersey Zoo Jersey Zoo (formerly Durrell Wildlife Park) is a zoological park established in 1959 on the island of Jersey in the English Channel by naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell (1925–1995). It is operated by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. ...

(formerly the Durrell Wildlife Park). The monkey drive was out of season, and not to exterminate monkeys, but in order to capture colobus monkeys. In his book on the expedition, published in 1972, he wrote that 2000 to 3000 monkeys are killed in monkey drives in Sierra Leone each year, including the "two species" of colobus monkeys, which do no damage to cocoa plantations, and were theoretically protected by law. The species mentioned by Durrell are now considered

genera Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial ...

black-and-white colobus Black-and-white colobuses (or colobi) are Old World monkeys of the genus ''Colobus'', native to Africa. They are closely related to the red colobus monkeys of genus '' Piliocolobus''. There are five species of this monkey, and at least eight subs ...

and red-and-black colobus.

References

{{Primate-stub Monkeys