STOMPer Alina took a video of a monkey that had managed to find its way onto the platform of Khatib MRT Station.
In an email yesterday, the STOMPer wrote:
"We were on our way back after attending Ms Moh's wake at Khatib when we spotted this monkey hanging around at the platform of the MRT station."
Do check out the video posted on STOMP.
The person who submitted this seems to think that everybody knows Miss Moh. Honestly, who cares? We want to see the monkey! Strike one for giving irrelevant and unimportant information.
And the video that was taken is horrible; a few seconds of a monkey running along the platform barrier, then the person panics as the monkey leaps onto the platform itself, and all we see are some shaky images of the floor, ending off with an upside-down view of somebody's pants and shoes. Strike two for shitty camera work.
Really, you call this "citizen journalism"?
And frankly speaking, I don't see how a solitary long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) that has strayed out of the forest (presumably from the area surrounding Lower Seletar Reservoir can be seen as an indicator of a 'worsening' problem with monkeys. If you're talking about troops raiding homes or accosting pedestrians, yes, that is a problem. The monkey in this incident is a juvenile, clearly not one of those big males, and is visibly frightened by the unfamiliar environment and human attention. Strike three for exaggeration, hyperbole and paranoia.
THIS, on the other hand, is a genuine problem:
Honestly, seeing how people in other cities deal with wildlife such as deer, bears, big cats, and crocodilians make our problems with macaques and stray cats and dogs seem pathetic in comparison.
I wish the person who submitted the article to STOMP had at least bothered to stay to find out what eventually happened to the macaque; that would have been far more useful information than learning that you were attending Miss Moh's wake.
