The hunters’ bounty on green monkeys has been increased from $15 to $25 in a bid to cull the population of the wild animals, officially declared pests responsible for the rampant crop destruction, Minister of Agriculture Indar Weir has announced.He told Wednesday’s edition of Down to Brasstacks on Voice of Barbados that the government had no intention of taking an unnecessarily heavy-handed approach to address the problem which he said had increased dramatically in recent months.“We had taken a paper to Cabinet just before I went off to holiday, and the Cabinet did agree that we would start back a programme to deal with the increase of the monkey population in Barbados,” said Weir.“We have increased the bounty to the hunters, it goes from $15 to $25. You can’t just cull all the monkeys, I want to make that clear. You have to have a programme that also in a very humane way speaks to how we deal with capturing and working with the Barbados Wildlife Reserve.”Welcoming the news, Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS) James Paul told Barbados TODAY that farmers had been long frustrated by the monkey population’s effect on stocks.
