This headline is from last Friday's Christian Science Monitor. So irritating monkeys is a field of study? What are the undergraduate prerequisites? Should Neatorama keep a monkey-irritator on staff, or contract out the work?
Link via Marginal Revolution
Monkeys do a lot of damage to crops and Japanese farmers have a helluva time keeping such agile and intelligent creatures from messing up and stealing their produce. The most effective way to do this is to surround their fields with electric fences but they are expensive and a maintenance hassle. The monkeys quickly figure out how to exploit any gaps in fences too, so the farmers have to keep a constant watch on their state of repair.
It's much easier and cheaper for farmers to keep animals in their fields that scare the monkeys away and do not damage the crops themselves. They've kept turkeys in apple orchards for years because monkeys are mortally afraid of them and they won't approach any place where they know there are turkeys!
The CSM headline is clearly tongue-in-cheek.
http://FunnyOrDie.com/m/tke
-T