Monkey time

Anthropologists and veterinarians and zoologists can tell us a lot about what's going on in the animal kingdom these days vis-a-vis us two legged types.

For years, people grew up and wanted to "get the hell out of this city" and move to the suburbs and beyond.  But for every townhouse development, every development with 48 houses on 24 acres total, every McMansion, the land we live on used to be farmland or woods or I don't know what-all else. That means we are giving deer and monkeys and newts and squirrels and all manner of fauna have to look around for a new place to live, and they holler, "We've gotta get the hell out of these suburbs" and head for the courthouse to set up show.  That's something that's been happening for years.

In the most instant matter, this pandemic means a lot of people are working from home, kids are "having school" at home, and not many people are going on weekend getaways.  Although I can tell that a significant portion of the population could surely use a month of weekends off right now.

There are so few people on the roads, we're all getting money back from our car insurers because no one even smashes up their Buick anymore.  And this means the cities and towns are open for animals to run around.  All over the world, you can see pictures of boars roaming the streets of Haifa or shaggy mountain goats strutting through the streets of Llandudno, a coastal town in Wales.

And I haven't had Llandudno for years! Used to get it in Little Wales.

And then there's this from India, where a laboratory technician, or lab tech, was walking around a medical college in Meerut. And then, out of the blue, here comes a squad of monkeys, attacking that tech and snatching away blood samples of patients who had tested positive for coronavirus.

“Monkeys grabbed and fled with the blood samples of four COVID-19 patients who are undergoing treatment ... we had to take their blood samples again,” reported Dr S. K. Garg, a top official at the college.

Official police sketch of ringleader

And you know how monkeys are. No one knows where they went or if they spilled the blood samples out of the vials they ripped off, or it they went to set up their own testing lab.

Dr Garg can't say if the monks could catch the 'Rona if they touched the blood, but told Reuters, “No evidence has been found that monkeys can contract the infection.”

So if you'e going to Meerut anytime soon, stay alert, and carry a banana at all times. The monkeys will leave you alone. They are sick of bananas.