Monkeys in the maize

I finally empathize with farmers who shoot animals foraging in their fields. Some monkeys came and ate a large quantity of our school’s maize. This year the rains haven’t been very good so there is not much maize. This probably correlates to less food that the monkeys can find growing wild.

Hearing that the monkeys stole our maize at first did not faze me. It seemed natural that they would take easy food, and the image of monkeys hopping in the fields taking the maize seemed humorous. Seeing the fields was a different matter, seeing the half eaten cobs and empty maize shells strewn across the fields, I remembered the students’ efforts to sow and weed the fields. It felt like someone came into my house and broke the furniture then left. Fortunately, I don’t believe our school relies heavily on the school farm. However, often farms are of poor families who rely heavily on the harvest, and the loss of most of a meager crop would be devastating. It's easy to see why many farmers shoot the vermin.

Our school’s response was curious. We sent one guard and the cook had his son protect the maize (since it was next to ours). Two people are not enough to ward off a hundred monkeys. The guard requested that students assist him, but the consensus was that this should not be done. The general opinion was that one person was effective as twenty and the school would be laughed at for sending the students on a monkey chase. This may be true but I would think that if you spent several weeks sowing and weeding the field, and would spend another couple of weeks harvesting and getting it ready to store, some time could be spent protecting it. The next week some students were in fact sent to protect the fields but by this time there was much less
maize to protect.