Hyderabad: Mannempalli village in Thimmapur mandal of Karimnagar district has probably the unique distinction of every household having a tiger. And these ‘big cats’ are the first and last line of defence against the monkey menace that has the village in its grip for several years.

“It is better than having nothing. The tigers are the only things that keep the monkeys away from homes and our fields,” Medi Anjaiah, the former sarpanch of the village, told Deccan Chronicle.

While monkeys are wary of tigers and run away from the big cats in the wild, the ones in Mannempalli are the stuffed toy kind. Each stuffed tiger cost the families anywhere between Rs 3,000 and Rs 5,000 depending on its size, Anjaiah says.

Just how many monkeys does Manempalli have to deal with? “We have 3,000 people in the village and suffice to say there are more monkeys than people here,” Anjaiah says.

While the villagers either leave the stuffed tigers on the doorsteps of their homes, or carry them around to scare monkeys away, and even take them to their fields to put these ‘tigers’ on guard duty, the monkeys, animals that are smart and learn fast, lose their fear of these ‘big cats’ ever so often. The verdict is that unless the tigers ‘move’ – with people shifting the tigers from one place to the other ever so often – the monkeys lose their fear, and even worse, if left out on guard duty, the stuffed tigers lose their colour and once the typical tiger shades fade away, the monkeys no longer care for these once resplendent ‘tigers’.

Asked if the government has not stepped in to help, Anjaiah says that the village was told that it was its problem and the panchayat has to deal with it.

Anjaiah says that a few years ago, the village paid Rs 550 per monkey to catchers brought in from Nellore who caught several simians and took them away. But the problem has persisted as people from other villages also have ‘their monkeys’ caught which are left on hillocks away from their villages. “One such crop of hillocks is near Mannempalli, and we keep getting a fresh lot of monkeys every now and then,” Anajaiah says.