#HUMAN JAPANESE WINDOWS#

#HUMAN JAPANESE WINDOWS#

Residents have now been advised to keep their doors and windows shut.

Some macaques have reportedly broken into buildings through unlocked doors and windows, and one elderly man was attacked in his sleep, write Arata Yamamoto and Dylan Butts for NBC News. “Japanese macaque monkeys have coexisted alongside humans since the Edo period-Japan is very mountainous and communities live close to mountains where monkeys live, so it is easy for monkeys to enter villages and towns,” she tells CNN. Human-monkey conflicts are becoming increasingly common as the macaque population grows and their natural habitat is destroyed, Mieko Kiyono, an expert in wildlife management and professor at Kobe University, tells CNN’s Jessie Yeung and Emiko Jozuka

Male Japanese macaques weigh about 25 pounds while females are about 18.5 pounds. The animals can live about 22 to 27 years. These monkeys were once considered endangered in Japan, but their population has rebounded, and they are now listed as least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They typically live in troops of about 20 to 30, but the groups can sometimes have more than 100 individuals. Japanese macaques ( Macaca fuscata), also called snow monkeys, are well-known for their habit of bathing in hot springs during the winter. “I have never seen anything like this my entire life.”

“They are so smart, and they tend to sneak up and attack from behind, often grabbing at your legs,” city official Masato Saito tells the AP. The monkeys have mostly targeted children and women, though officials say attacks on men and the elderly have become more frequent. No serious injuries have been reported, but the victims were all advised to get hospital treatment, per Yuri Kageyama from the Associated Press. More than 50 individuals have been attacked by a group of roaming macaque monkeys in and around the southern Japanese city of Yamaguchi in the past three weeks.

Human japanese