It’s both a local delicacy and a forbidden food. We’re talking about bakso, a spicy meatball soup loved throughout Indonesia, and monkey meat, respectively. An Indonesian couple from Situbondo province have been arrested for selling monkey meat for consumption. The problem isn’t the monkey meat, which the woman got caught with 77 pounds of, but where the monkey meat came from. As it turns out, eating protected species is a bad idea, no matter where you’re from.
The couple had been going into nearby Baluran National Park with sticks and a rifle, and harvesting the Javan langur, or silver-leaf monkey. When arrested, the woman had 25 monkey carcasses waiting to be processed, and the couple may have harvested up to 500 monkeys from within the protected rain forest. It’s apparently a fairly common practice for that area of Java, despite condemnation from local Islamic leaders and police arrests.
Monkey meat is about half the price of beef or lamb at market; it’s even cheaper when you illegally kill and harvest your own monkeys from a protected jungle. There’s nothing cheaper than free.
Tags: crimes, food tampering, bakso, meatball soup made of monkey meat, Situbondo, Indonesia, couple fined for selling monkey meat, Javan langur, silver-leaf monkeys, Baluran National Park, forbidden monkey meat, poachers
