Last week, Beed district in central Maharashtra grabbed the headlines for a rather bizarre incident. According to local news reports, a clan of monkeys killed 250 dogs over a month or so by dropping them down from buildings and treetops. What’s being seen as “revenge” allegedly had its roots in an incident where a pack of dogs mauled a baby monkey to death. In a subsequent interview with the Wire, Sachin Kand, the divisional forest officer of Beed clarified that while the Hanuman langurs did snatch up puppies in Majalgaon, they ‘lifted’ only three, and not 250 as some news reports claimed. Two monkeys that were allegedly involved in the killing have been captured by the Nagpur Forest Department and will be released in a nearby forest, Kand said in a statement. 

Over the years, researchers have been sussing out various aspects of primate behaviour and psychology, but the idea of simians seeking revenge has been a tough one to crack. “You need a highly evolved brain for that. We see it [tendency to avenge] in humans, and to an extent even in chimpanzees, who come closest to humans, but not in langurs. In fact, I have witnessed a number of instances where they [langurs] are riding piggyback on dogs, and even cuddling them,” says primatologist Rishi Kumar, who researched the sand-coloured Rhesus macaque, and Bonnet macaque, commonly found at temples in South India, for his PhD. The Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus entellus) in question are found in a range of habitats from tropical rainforests in the Western Ghats to over 3,000 metres in the Himalayas. This species is predominantly leaf-eating and arboreal. According to Kumar, what typically happens when a female monkey loses an infant, is that she takes away the infant of another female and carries it for some time. “In Hanuman langurs of Maharashtra, it’s usually a multi-female group, where there’s one male and several females. There’s a pecking order in both [multi-female and multi-male groups]. We also see proactive alloparenting among them, wherein monkeys other than the mother assist with infant care. In the Beed incident, there’s footage of the monkey carrying the pups. I believe there’s a good chance that she might have taken the pup not with the intention of killing it, but fostering it for a while. The pups may have died while she was climbing the tree, or from starvation.” Revenge is highly unlikely, thinks Kumar.