Hacker News Reader

Comment by groos | Hacker News Reader

The effort to reduce electricity theft has had an interesting side effect. One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods. This also makes them safe for monkeys to use as 'roads' with the result that roving gangs of monkeys move from neighborhood to neighborhood with ease and also have access to the upper floor of apartment buildings because of the proximity of the power lines. I saw this in person a few years ago.

View on HN

Well the planet is theirs as well, so one may argue that putting up live wires that can electrocute them is quite cruel in the first place, especially given the lack of any preservation of their natural habitats in most places.

They just need to be educated not to touch the wires. As it happens they figured it out pretty quick

Actually they could have touched the wires as long as they touched only one and nothing which was earthed, but that might be pretty complicated to learn by trial and error, especially if error often means death.

Yep, cannot learn the lesson if you don't survive it.

Others can.

If you have enough friends, you can learn the lesson.

Isn't it pretty unique to learn from seeing? My cat certainly doesn't understand "monkey see, monkey do". In this case it's about literal monkeys of course, but I'm not even sure all of them have this capacity. Probably also some birds and dolphins and such could learn this way, but not most animals with 'friends' (or late friends)

I don’t think it’s that unique. Social learning is documented in a wide range of species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_in_animals

Concerns about animal welfare are increasing and as a result are being factored into infrastructure projects. Better late than never.

Also it would also avoid such incidents.

Minister blames monkey for Sri Lanka nationwide power cut

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8d92n28pqjo

Infrastructure projects, whether big or small should always factor in local ecosystem. For example, highways built with with overpasses and underpasses are a great help to animals.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/samruddhi-fo...

Agreed. And nothing is stopping folks from running underground cables except crying about it being more expensive (i.e the true cost vs side effects to other populations so long as it doesn’t affect the consumers).

It’s as though all wealth and progress hinge on taking from others.

To be fair, it's a lot more expensive, and these are not rich places we're talking about.

Labour costs are a lot lower, so it is a lot less expensive than in wealthier places.

A couple years ago in Nepal, a large group of monkeys passed by a window next to my table at a restaurant. They were casually strolling on the power lines.

Tell me more about said gangs of monkeys.

Well the monkeys should be just shot in that case. Violence is an underrated solution.

> One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods.

This is going to be less effective going forward due to insulation piercing connectors, which simply clamp around an insulated conductor and pierce the insulation to connect to the conductor underneath.

A suitably insane person could also just strip the insulation from a small segment of the conductor, one phase at a time, and hand wrap a splice conductor around the live one and tape it up.

Great news for the monkeys though! I would not want to witness a monkey making contact with two uninsulated conductors on different phases, yeesh.

You have to be suitably insane to do that. Most aren't.

Someone stealing from a live wire already is

Reply on news.ycombinator.com