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Sep. 30th, 2012 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyCalifornia has banned ex-gay "therapies" for minors. Adults can still spend their money on whatever unnecessary scams they please.
September 30, 2012
California Is First State to Ban Gay ‘Cure’ for Minors
By ERIK ECKHOLM
California has become the first state to ban the use for minors of disputed therapies to “overcome” homosexuality, a step hailed by gay rights groups across the country that say the therapies have caused dangerous emotional harm to gay and lesbian teenagers.
“This bill bans nonscientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide,” Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement on Saturday after he signed the bill into law. “These practices have no basis in science or medicine, and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”
The law, which is to take effect on Jan. 1, states that no “mental health provider” shall provide minors with therapy intended to change their sexual orientation, including efforts to “change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
The law was sponsored by State Senator Ted W. Lieu and supported by a long list of medical and psychological societies, as well by state and national advocates for gay rights. Also speaking up for the ban were former patients who described emotional scars they said they were left with after being pushed into the therapy by their parents and finding that they could not change their sexual orientation or did not want to.
But some therapists and conservative religious leaders who promote methods that they say can reduce homosexual desire have condemned the new law as a violation of free choice. They say that it will harm young people who want to fight homosexual attractions on religious or other grounds and warn that it will lead more people to seek help from untrained amateurs.
The use of harsh aversion techniques, like electric shock or nausea-inducing drugs, to combat homosexual desires has largely disappeared. But during the last three decades, some psychologists have refined a theory of “reparative therapy,” which ties homosexual desires to emotional wounds in early childhood and, in some cases, to early sexual abuse.
These therapists say that with proper treatment, thousands of patients have succeeded in reducing their homosexual attraction and in enhancing heterosexual desire, though most therapists acknowledge that total “cures” are rare. But their methods have come under growing attack from gays who say the therapy has led to guilt, hopelessness and anger.
Reparative therapists, a small minority within the mental health profession, united in 1992 in the National Association for Research and Therapy on Homosexuality, based in Encino, Calif. The group did not immediately comment on the new California law, but its leaders have previously attacked the legislation as based on politics, not science, and said they would consider challenging it in court as an unjustified intrusion into professional practice.
One licensed family therapist and member of the association, David H. Pickup of Glendale, Calif., said in a recent interview that the ban would cause harm to many who want and need the therapy.
“If boys have been sexually abused and homosexual feelings that are not authentic later come up, we have to tell them no, we can’t help you,” Mr. Pickup said.
Gay and lesbian leaders, along with major scientific groups, reject such theories outright and say there is no scientific evidence that inner sexual attractions can be altered.
“Reparative therapy is junk science being used to justify religious beliefs,” said Wayne Besen, the director of Truth Wins Out, a gay advocacy group.
The California law is a milestone, but only a first step, Mr. Besen said, because the ideas in reparative therapy have been widely adopted by church ministries and others promoting the idea that homosexual urges can be banished.
Legislators in New Jersey and a few other states have discussed introducing similar bills to ban the use of the therapy for minors, Mr. Besen said.
Proudly Bearing Elders’ Scars, Their Skin Says ‘Never Forget’
JERUSALEM — When Eli Sagir showed her grandfather, Yosef Diamant, the new tattoo on her left forearm, he bent his head to kiss it.
Mr. Diamant had the same tattoo, the number 157622, permanently inked on his own arm by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Nearly 70 years later, Ms. Sagir got hers at a hip tattoo parlor downtown after a high school trip to Poland. The next week, her mother and brother also had the six digits inscribed onto their forearms. This month, her uncle followed suit.
“All my generation knows nothing about the Holocaust,” said Ms. Sagir, 21, who has had the tattoo for four years. “You talk with people and they think it’s like the Exodus from Egypt, ancient history. I decided to do it to remind my generation: I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.”
Mr. Diamant’s descendants are among a handful of children and grandchildren of Auschwitz survivors here who have taken the step of memorializing the darkest days of history on their own bodies. With the number of survivors here dropping to about 200,000 from 400,000 a decade ago, institutions and individuals are grappling with how best to remember the Holocaust — so integral to Israel’s founding and identity — after those who lived it are gone.
Rite-of-passage trips to the death camps, like the one Ms. Sagir took, are now standard for high school students. The Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and other museums are trying to make exhibits more accessible, using individual stories and special effects. Arguments rage about whether that approach trivializes symbols long held as sacred and whether the primary message should be about the importance of a self-reliant Jewish state in preventing a future genocide or a more universal one about racism and tolerance.
“We are moving from lived memory to historical memory,” noted Michael Berenbaum, a professor at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles who is among the foremost scholars of the memorialization of the Holocaust. “We’re at that transition, and this is sort of a brazen, in-your-face way of bridging it.”
Mr. Berenbaum, himself the son of survivors, said that “replicating an act that destroyed their name and made them into a number would not be my first or second or third choice,” but, he added, “it sure beats some of the other tattoos that some of the young people are drawing on their skin.”
It is certainly an intensely personal decision that often provokes ugly interactions with strangers offended by the reappropriation of perhaps the most profound symbol of the Holocaust’s dehumanization of its victims. The fact that tattooing is prohibited by Jewish law — some survivors long feared, incorrectly, that their numbers would bar them from being buried in Jewish cemeteries — makes the phenomenon more unsettling to some, which may be part of the point.
“It’s shocking when you see the number on a very young girl’s hand,” Ms. Sagir said. “It’s very shocking. You have to ask, Why?”
Tattooing was introduced at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, and at the adjacent Birkenau the next March. They were the only camps to employ the practice, and it is unclear how many people were branded, briefly on the chest and more commonly on the left forearm.
Only those deemed fit for work were tattooed, so despite the degradation, the numbers were in some cases worn with pride, particularly lower ones, which indicated having survived several brutal winters in the camp. “Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000,” Primo Levi wrote in his seminal memoir, “Survival in Auschwitz,” describing the tattoos as part of “the demolition of a man.”
After the war, some Auschwitz survivors rushed to remove the tattoos through surgery or hid them under long sleeves. But over the decades, others played their numbers in the lottery or used them as passwords.
Dana Doron, a 31-year-old doctor and daughter of a survivor, interviewed about 50 tattooed survivors for the new Israeli documentary “Numbered,” which she directed with Uriel Sinai, a photojournalist; it will make its premiere in the United States next month at the Chicago International Film Festival.
When she asked survivors whether lovers kissed the number as they might a scar, Ms. Doron said, “some of them looked at me like, ‘What are you nuts?’ and some of them said, ‘Of course.’ ”
“To me, it’s a scar,” said Ms. Doron, who grew interested in the numbering while drawing blood from a tattooed arm in an emergency room. “The fact that young people are choosing to get the tattoos is, in my eyes, a sign that we’re still carrying the scar of the Holocaust.”
“Numbered” follows Hanna Rabinovitz, a middle-aged woman who puts her father’s number on her ankle after his death. The film also tells the story of Ayal Gelles, a 28-year-old computer programmer, and his grandfather, Avraham Nachshon, 86, both of whom bear the number A-15510 on their arms.
“Like an inheritance or something,” Mr. Gelles said of his tattoo. “It’s provocative, I guess. Everyone is kind of appalled at first, kind of shocked by it.”
Mr. Gelles said he had an epiphany seeing cows branded at a ranch in Argentina, leading him to get the tattoo and to adopt a vegan diet. He did not tell Mr. Nachshon of his plan.
“If I knew, I would have said to you not to do it,” the grandfather told his grandson one recent evening.
“I dream every night about it,” Mr. Nachshon said as he told his Holocaust story, which includes several months at Birkenau, where his mother and sister were killed in the gas chambers. “Many times we’re running away from the Germans. Sometimes the whole night I was running. Maybe this time they won’t catch me.”
Mr. Nachshon swims, does yoga or runs on a treadmill each morning, returning home by 2 p.m. to feed the neighborhood cats and pass the hours in front of the TV. A couple of times a week, Mr. Gelles comes for supper at his Tel Aviv apartment, and they watch TV together.
“Every time I see it, it’s a reminder to call him,” Mr. Gelles said of the number. “I find it kind of hard to relate to people I don’t know and places I haven’t been to and this thing called the Holocaust. The thing I relate to more is my grandfather.”
The Israeli who tattooed Livia Ravek’s number, 4559, on her son, Oded Ravek, and grandson, Daniel Philosoph, did it free.
It was a Friday. Mr. Ravek, a 56-year-old glass artist who lives in Ottawa and was here visiting family when he was tattooed two years ago, brought Sabbath flowers to his mother. “She was really upset about it at first,” he said. “When I explained the reasons for why I did it, we cried together. I said, ‘You’re always with me.’ ”
The 10 tattooed descendants interviewed for this article echoed one another’s motivations: they wanted to be intimately, eternally bonded to their survivor-relative. And they wanted to live the mantra “Never forget” with something that would constantly provoke questions and conversation.
Ms. Sagir, a cashier at a minimarket in the heart of touristy Jerusalem, said she is asked about the number 10 times a day. There was one man who called her “pathetic,” saying of her grandfather, “You’re trying to be him and take his suffering.” And there was a police officer who said, “God creates the forgetfulness so we can forget,” Ms. Sagir recalled. “I told her, ‘Because of people like you who want to forget this, we will have it again.’ ”
One recent Friday, Ms. Sagir accompanied her uncle, Doron Diamant, 40, a carpenter and father of four, to the tattoo parlor. He was the fifth descendant of Yosef Diamant — who died last year at 84 — to be tattooed.
It was done in 15 minutes, for about $40. When the tattoo artist, a Russian immigrant, joked that he is “not so patriotic” to do it at a discount, Mr. Diamant quietly seethed.
“This is the reason he sits here, this tattoo and what this number represents,” Mr. Diamant said. “We got the country because of these people.”
Indians Feed the Monkeys, Which Bite the Hand
NEW DELHI — The first interloper stepped in front of her on the sidewalk and silently held up his hand. The second appeared behind her and beckoned for her bag. Maeve O’Connor was trapped.
Resistance would have been dangerous, so Ms. O’Connor handed it over. The two then sauntered arrogantly away. The whole encounter lasted no more than 15 seconds — just one more coordinated mugging by rhesus monkeys in a city increasingly plagued by them.
“I had other bags with me, but they knew the bag that had the fresh bread in it,” Ms. O’Connor said.
“They were totally silent, very quick and highly effective.”
The monkey population of Delhi has grown so large and aggressive that overwhelmed city officials have petitioned India’s Supreme Court to relieve them of the task of monkey control.
“We have trapped 13,013 monkeys since 2007,” said R. B. S. Tyagi, director of veterinary services for Delhi’s principal city government. Nonetheless, Delhi’s monkey population has only increased.
The reason is simple: People feed them. Monkeys are the living representatives of the cherished Hindu god Hanuman, and Hindu tradition calls for feeding monkeys on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
Dr. Tyagi expressed impatience with residents who feed the monkeys one day, then complain to the city when the monkeys steal their clothes on another day.
Dr. Tyagi’s agency has asked the city’s wildlife agency for help, but wildlife officials claim that the monkeys — a scourge of the city for years as urbanization has encroached on their original habitat — are no longer wild and are thus not their responsibility.
“This problem will never be solved” as long as Hindus feed monkeys regularly, said R. M. Shukla, the city’s chief wildlife warden. “We’ve issued many ads asking people not to feed monkeys in public places.”
In 2007, a Delhi deputy mayor died when he fell from his terrace after being attacked by monkeys, a widely publicized episode that spurred the city to step up its efforts to move monkeys to safer environments. Yet such attacks continue. This month a 14-year-old girl was seriously injured when she fell from the roof of a five-story residential building after monkeys pursued her.
“Monkeys do commonly bite people, and their bite wounds can be extensive,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., wrote in an e-mail. “They are smart enough to often attack the face of the person.”
While monkey bites can lead to rabies or a fatal form of the herpes virus, documented cases are “close to nonexistent,” Dr. Fauci wrote. Skin bacterial infections from bites are common, however. They are treatable with antibiotics.
Stories abound in Delhi of monkeys’ entering homes, ripping out wiring, stealing clothes and biting those who surprise them. They treat the Indian Parliament building as a playground, have invaded the prime minister’s office and Defense Ministry, sometimes ride buses and subway trains, and chase diplomats from their well-tended gardens.
Roopi Saran, a Delhi resident, has seen monkeys steal candy from the hands of her children. And tribes of monkeys often take over her yard, preventing her and her children from venturing outside.
“So we sit inside our house like caged animals, like we’re the ones in the zoo and they’re the owners outside looking at us,” Ms. Saran said.
With the city’s trapping program a failure, some residents are getting a bigger monkey, a langur, to urinate around their homes. The acrid smell of the urine scares the smaller rhesus monkeys away for weeks. But the odor is no bouquet for humans, either, and as soon as it disappears, the rhesus monkeys return.
Amar Singh, a langur handler, was sitting across the street recently from one of his langurs in Delhi’s diplomatic neighborhood while his monkey systematically stripped the leaves off a tree in the yard of well-tended home. The langur, a large monkey with a black face dramatically framed by white fur, was tied to a pole with a six-foot leash. Mr. Singh cautioned against getting anywhere near the animal because “a langur’s slap is so hard, it can send its target back by five feet.”
Mr. Singh said that he had 65 langurs urinating on prominent homes and buildings throughout Delhi. He and his partners feed and walk each monkey during the day, but they remain tied to their posts overnight. He charges about $200 a month.
Dr. Tyagi said langurs simply pushed rhesus monkeys to ransack adjoining homes. The city started out seven years ago paying monkey catchers $5 for every rhesus monkey they caught. It raised the price to $9 four years ago, and now pays $12.
“Despite offering this rate, there are few monkey catchers,” he said.
Years of trapping, using cages baited with fruit and nuts, have taught the monkeys to avoid the traps. For a time, the city hired highly professional trapping teams from the south of India, but even they have stopped coming to Delhi, Dr. Tyagi said. Himachal Pradesh, a northern Indian state, issued permits to kill monkeys that destroyed crops, but the practice spurred protests and is not being considered in Delhi.
Trapped monkeys are brought to a sanctuary in the south of Delhi, but residents who live near the sanctuary say their lives have been ruined by the influx. Monkeys easily scale the sanctuary’s walls and often find their way back to Delhi’s central neighborhoods.
Kali, who lives in a small hut near the sanctuary and goes by only one name, said her young daughter and niece had both been bitten twice, requiring trips to the hospital and expensive vaccinations. After being attacked while bathing, she now asks her husband to stand guard when she washes. And for a poor family like hers, the monkeys are a constant threat in more ways than one.
“I give them my leftovers like roti,” she said. “But then they ran away with my onions.”
September 30, 2012
California Is First State to Ban Gay ‘Cure’ for Minors
By ERIK ECKHOLM
California has become the first state to ban the use for minors of disputed therapies to “overcome” homosexuality, a step hailed by gay rights groups across the country that say the therapies have caused dangerous emotional harm to gay and lesbian teenagers.
“This bill bans nonscientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide,” Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement on Saturday after he signed the bill into law. “These practices have no basis in science or medicine, and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”
The law, which is to take effect on Jan. 1, states that no “mental health provider” shall provide minors with therapy intended to change their sexual orientation, including efforts to “change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
The law was sponsored by State Senator Ted W. Lieu and supported by a long list of medical and psychological societies, as well by state and national advocates for gay rights. Also speaking up for the ban were former patients who described emotional scars they said they were left with after being pushed into the therapy by their parents and finding that they could not change their sexual orientation or did not want to.
But some therapists and conservative religious leaders who promote methods that they say can reduce homosexual desire have condemned the new law as a violation of free choice. They say that it will harm young people who want to fight homosexual attractions on religious or other grounds and warn that it will lead more people to seek help from untrained amateurs.
The use of harsh aversion techniques, like electric shock or nausea-inducing drugs, to combat homosexual desires has largely disappeared. But during the last three decades, some psychologists have refined a theory of “reparative therapy,” which ties homosexual desires to emotional wounds in early childhood and, in some cases, to early sexual abuse.
These therapists say that with proper treatment, thousands of patients have succeeded in reducing their homosexual attraction and in enhancing heterosexual desire, though most therapists acknowledge that total “cures” are rare. But their methods have come under growing attack from gays who say the therapy has led to guilt, hopelessness and anger.
Reparative therapists, a small minority within the mental health profession, united in 1992 in the National Association for Research and Therapy on Homosexuality, based in Encino, Calif. The group did not immediately comment on the new California law, but its leaders have previously attacked the legislation as based on politics, not science, and said they would consider challenging it in court as an unjustified intrusion into professional practice.
One licensed family therapist and member of the association, David H. Pickup of Glendale, Calif., said in a recent interview that the ban would cause harm to many who want and need the therapy.
“If boys have been sexually abused and homosexual feelings that are not authentic later come up, we have to tell them no, we can’t help you,” Mr. Pickup said.
Gay and lesbian leaders, along with major scientific groups, reject such theories outright and say there is no scientific evidence that inner sexual attractions can be altered.
“Reparative therapy is junk science being used to justify religious beliefs,” said Wayne Besen, the director of Truth Wins Out, a gay advocacy group.
The California law is a milestone, but only a first step, Mr. Besen said, because the ideas in reparative therapy have been widely adopted by church ministries and others promoting the idea that homosexual urges can be banished.
Legislators in New Jersey and a few other states have discussed introducing similar bills to ban the use of the therapy for minors, Mr. Besen said.
Proudly Bearing Elders’ Scars, Their Skin Says ‘Never Forget’
JERUSALEM — When Eli Sagir showed her grandfather, Yosef Diamant, the new tattoo on her left forearm, he bent his head to kiss it.
Mr. Diamant had the same tattoo, the number 157622, permanently inked on his own arm by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Nearly 70 years later, Ms. Sagir got hers at a hip tattoo parlor downtown after a high school trip to Poland. The next week, her mother and brother also had the six digits inscribed onto their forearms. This month, her uncle followed suit.
“All my generation knows nothing about the Holocaust,” said Ms. Sagir, 21, who has had the tattoo for four years. “You talk with people and they think it’s like the Exodus from Egypt, ancient history. I decided to do it to remind my generation: I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.”
Mr. Diamant’s descendants are among a handful of children and grandchildren of Auschwitz survivors here who have taken the step of memorializing the darkest days of history on their own bodies. With the number of survivors here dropping to about 200,000 from 400,000 a decade ago, institutions and individuals are grappling with how best to remember the Holocaust — so integral to Israel’s founding and identity — after those who lived it are gone.
Rite-of-passage trips to the death camps, like the one Ms. Sagir took, are now standard for high school students. The Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and other museums are trying to make exhibits more accessible, using individual stories and special effects. Arguments rage about whether that approach trivializes symbols long held as sacred and whether the primary message should be about the importance of a self-reliant Jewish state in preventing a future genocide or a more universal one about racism and tolerance.
“We are moving from lived memory to historical memory,” noted Michael Berenbaum, a professor at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles who is among the foremost scholars of the memorialization of the Holocaust. “We’re at that transition, and this is sort of a brazen, in-your-face way of bridging it.”
Mr. Berenbaum, himself the son of survivors, said that “replicating an act that destroyed their name and made them into a number would not be my first or second or third choice,” but, he added, “it sure beats some of the other tattoos that some of the young people are drawing on their skin.”
It is certainly an intensely personal decision that often provokes ugly interactions with strangers offended by the reappropriation of perhaps the most profound symbol of the Holocaust’s dehumanization of its victims. The fact that tattooing is prohibited by Jewish law — some survivors long feared, incorrectly, that their numbers would bar them from being buried in Jewish cemeteries — makes the phenomenon more unsettling to some, which may be part of the point.
“It’s shocking when you see the number on a very young girl’s hand,” Ms. Sagir said. “It’s very shocking. You have to ask, Why?”
Tattooing was introduced at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, and at the adjacent Birkenau the next March. They were the only camps to employ the practice, and it is unclear how many people were branded, briefly on the chest and more commonly on the left forearm.
Only those deemed fit for work were tattooed, so despite the degradation, the numbers were in some cases worn with pride, particularly lower ones, which indicated having survived several brutal winters in the camp. “Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000,” Primo Levi wrote in his seminal memoir, “Survival in Auschwitz,” describing the tattoos as part of “the demolition of a man.”
After the war, some Auschwitz survivors rushed to remove the tattoos through surgery or hid them under long sleeves. But over the decades, others played their numbers in the lottery or used them as passwords.
Dana Doron, a 31-year-old doctor and daughter of a survivor, interviewed about 50 tattooed survivors for the new Israeli documentary “Numbered,” which she directed with Uriel Sinai, a photojournalist; it will make its premiere in the United States next month at the Chicago International Film Festival.
When she asked survivors whether lovers kissed the number as they might a scar, Ms. Doron said, “some of them looked at me like, ‘What are you nuts?’ and some of them said, ‘Of course.’ ”
“To me, it’s a scar,” said Ms. Doron, who grew interested in the numbering while drawing blood from a tattooed arm in an emergency room. “The fact that young people are choosing to get the tattoos is, in my eyes, a sign that we’re still carrying the scar of the Holocaust.”
“Numbered” follows Hanna Rabinovitz, a middle-aged woman who puts her father’s number on her ankle after his death. The film also tells the story of Ayal Gelles, a 28-year-old computer programmer, and his grandfather, Avraham Nachshon, 86, both of whom bear the number A-15510 on their arms.
“Like an inheritance or something,” Mr. Gelles said of his tattoo. “It’s provocative, I guess. Everyone is kind of appalled at first, kind of shocked by it.”
Mr. Gelles said he had an epiphany seeing cows branded at a ranch in Argentina, leading him to get the tattoo and to adopt a vegan diet. He did not tell Mr. Nachshon of his plan.
“If I knew, I would have said to you not to do it,” the grandfather told his grandson one recent evening.
“I dream every night about it,” Mr. Nachshon said as he told his Holocaust story, which includes several months at Birkenau, where his mother and sister were killed in the gas chambers. “Many times we’re running away from the Germans. Sometimes the whole night I was running. Maybe this time they won’t catch me.”
Mr. Nachshon swims, does yoga or runs on a treadmill each morning, returning home by 2 p.m. to feed the neighborhood cats and pass the hours in front of the TV. A couple of times a week, Mr. Gelles comes for supper at his Tel Aviv apartment, and they watch TV together.
“Every time I see it, it’s a reminder to call him,” Mr. Gelles said of the number. “I find it kind of hard to relate to people I don’t know and places I haven’t been to and this thing called the Holocaust. The thing I relate to more is my grandfather.”
The Israeli who tattooed Livia Ravek’s number, 4559, on her son, Oded Ravek, and grandson, Daniel Philosoph, did it free.
It was a Friday. Mr. Ravek, a 56-year-old glass artist who lives in Ottawa and was here visiting family when he was tattooed two years ago, brought Sabbath flowers to his mother. “She was really upset about it at first,” he said. “When I explained the reasons for why I did it, we cried together. I said, ‘You’re always with me.’ ”
The 10 tattooed descendants interviewed for this article echoed one another’s motivations: they wanted to be intimately, eternally bonded to their survivor-relative. And they wanted to live the mantra “Never forget” with something that would constantly provoke questions and conversation.
Ms. Sagir, a cashier at a minimarket in the heart of touristy Jerusalem, said she is asked about the number 10 times a day. There was one man who called her “pathetic,” saying of her grandfather, “You’re trying to be him and take his suffering.” And there was a police officer who said, “God creates the forgetfulness so we can forget,” Ms. Sagir recalled. “I told her, ‘Because of people like you who want to forget this, we will have it again.’ ”
One recent Friday, Ms. Sagir accompanied her uncle, Doron Diamant, 40, a carpenter and father of four, to the tattoo parlor. He was the fifth descendant of Yosef Diamant — who died last year at 84 — to be tattooed.
It was done in 15 minutes, for about $40. When the tattoo artist, a Russian immigrant, joked that he is “not so patriotic” to do it at a discount, Mr. Diamant quietly seethed.
“This is the reason he sits here, this tattoo and what this number represents,” Mr. Diamant said. “We got the country because of these people.”
Indians Feed the Monkeys, Which Bite the Hand
NEW DELHI — The first interloper stepped in front of her on the sidewalk and silently held up his hand. The second appeared behind her and beckoned for her bag. Maeve O’Connor was trapped.
Resistance would have been dangerous, so Ms. O’Connor handed it over. The two then sauntered arrogantly away. The whole encounter lasted no more than 15 seconds — just one more coordinated mugging by rhesus monkeys in a city increasingly plagued by them.
“I had other bags with me, but they knew the bag that had the fresh bread in it,” Ms. O’Connor said.
“They were totally silent, very quick and highly effective.”
The monkey population of Delhi has grown so large and aggressive that overwhelmed city officials have petitioned India’s Supreme Court to relieve them of the task of monkey control.
“We have trapped 13,013 monkeys since 2007,” said R. B. S. Tyagi, director of veterinary services for Delhi’s principal city government. Nonetheless, Delhi’s monkey population has only increased.
The reason is simple: People feed them. Monkeys are the living representatives of the cherished Hindu god Hanuman, and Hindu tradition calls for feeding monkeys on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
Dr. Tyagi expressed impatience with residents who feed the monkeys one day, then complain to the city when the monkeys steal their clothes on another day.
Dr. Tyagi’s agency has asked the city’s wildlife agency for help, but wildlife officials claim that the monkeys — a scourge of the city for years as urbanization has encroached on their original habitat — are no longer wild and are thus not their responsibility.
“This problem will never be solved” as long as Hindus feed monkeys regularly, said R. M. Shukla, the city’s chief wildlife warden. “We’ve issued many ads asking people not to feed monkeys in public places.”
In 2007, a Delhi deputy mayor died when he fell from his terrace after being attacked by monkeys, a widely publicized episode that spurred the city to step up its efforts to move monkeys to safer environments. Yet such attacks continue. This month a 14-year-old girl was seriously injured when she fell from the roof of a five-story residential building after monkeys pursued her.
“Monkeys do commonly bite people, and their bite wounds can be extensive,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., wrote in an e-mail. “They are smart enough to often attack the face of the person.”
While monkey bites can lead to rabies or a fatal form of the herpes virus, documented cases are “close to nonexistent,” Dr. Fauci wrote. Skin bacterial infections from bites are common, however. They are treatable with antibiotics.
Stories abound in Delhi of monkeys’ entering homes, ripping out wiring, stealing clothes and biting those who surprise them. They treat the Indian Parliament building as a playground, have invaded the prime minister’s office and Defense Ministry, sometimes ride buses and subway trains, and chase diplomats from their well-tended gardens.
Roopi Saran, a Delhi resident, has seen monkeys steal candy from the hands of her children. And tribes of monkeys often take over her yard, preventing her and her children from venturing outside.
“So we sit inside our house like caged animals, like we’re the ones in the zoo and they’re the owners outside looking at us,” Ms. Saran said.
With the city’s trapping program a failure, some residents are getting a bigger monkey, a langur, to urinate around their homes. The acrid smell of the urine scares the smaller rhesus monkeys away for weeks. But the odor is no bouquet for humans, either, and as soon as it disappears, the rhesus monkeys return.
Amar Singh, a langur handler, was sitting across the street recently from one of his langurs in Delhi’s diplomatic neighborhood while his monkey systematically stripped the leaves off a tree in the yard of well-tended home. The langur, a large monkey with a black face dramatically framed by white fur, was tied to a pole with a six-foot leash. Mr. Singh cautioned against getting anywhere near the animal because “a langur’s slap is so hard, it can send its target back by five feet.”
Mr. Singh said that he had 65 langurs urinating on prominent homes and buildings throughout Delhi. He and his partners feed and walk each monkey during the day, but they remain tied to their posts overnight. He charges about $200 a month.
Dr. Tyagi said langurs simply pushed rhesus monkeys to ransack adjoining homes. The city started out seven years ago paying monkey catchers $5 for every rhesus monkey they caught. It raised the price to $9 four years ago, and now pays $12.
“Despite offering this rate, there are few monkey catchers,” he said.
Years of trapping, using cages baited with fruit and nuts, have taught the monkeys to avoid the traps. For a time, the city hired highly professional trapping teams from the south of India, but even they have stopped coming to Delhi, Dr. Tyagi said. Himachal Pradesh, a northern Indian state, issued permits to kill monkeys that destroyed crops, but the practice spurred protests and is not being considered in Delhi.
Trapped monkeys are brought to a sanctuary in the south of Delhi, but residents who live near the sanctuary say their lives have been ruined by the influx. Monkeys easily scale the sanctuary’s walls and often find their way back to Delhi’s central neighborhoods.
Kali, who lives in a small hut near the sanctuary and goes by only one name, said her young daughter and niece had both been bitten twice, requiring trips to the hospital and expensive vaccinations. After being attacked while bathing, she now asks her husband to stand guard when she washes. And for a poor family like hers, the monkeys are a constant threat in more ways than one.
“I give them my leftovers like roti,” she said. “But then they ran away with my onions.”
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Date: 2012-10-03 04:58 pm (UTC)"To solve this problem it is necessary to first understand that the monkeys' behavior is adaptive. They are hungry and they have figured out a way to get food. The solution requires a method of rewarding them for getting food another way.
"The simplest method would be to set up feeding stations, perhaps designed to look like a miniature version of a Hindu shrine to Hanuman, that has simple levers for them to pull that will produce appropriate food. Monkeys like to manipulate devices and would likely take to this quite readily as a way of feeding themselves.
"Indians concerned about the welfare of the monkeys should be easily persuaded to quit feeding them human food when it is widely known that they are being fed in a more appropriate manner. Over time the schedules of reinforcement for receiving food can be gradually adjusted so that the monkeys will need to spend considerable time each day working at the task of getting food from their very own vending machines."