With visitors gone, animals take over

These days, many popular tourist locations are empty of people, but in some cases animals have taken their place.

In Nara, Japan, once the country’s capital, a thousand or so deer who normally live in a nearby grassy park and are one of the town’s attractions, have taken to wandering into the center of town, looking for food. Normally, visitors bring them ‘deer crackers’ and they pose for selfies in return. The migration causes traffic issues, because the deer have the right of way.

In Thailand, elephants whose owners give visitors elephant rides are finding so few customers they have taken their elephants back to remote areas where the animals can eat free; the cost of feed in coastal resort villages is too high.

But in Lopburi, Thailand, the situation is different. Troupes of boisterous macaque monkeys, left to fend for themselves with no visitors to the local temple where they are normally housed as good luck charms, They have swarmed the streets and staged huge fights over scarce morsels of food.

In Santiago, Chile, pumas have been spotted; they are believed to have come down from the hills and been able to enter the city because surrounding highways and streets were empty.

Even in situations where animals are contained, they have shown effects from the changed circumstance. Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, believing that its penguins were bored without visitors, has let them out on ‘field trips’ to see other parts of the museum, including the aquarium.

Keepers at the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium also say the animals miss visitors, and are interacting differently with each other during the absence.