This wasn’t part of the workout plan.

We’re into the second week of January, so it’s right about time for a lot of people to be losing motivation for the fitness regimens they pledged to follow for their New Year’s resolutions. However, should one man in Japan decide he’s going to take a break from jogging for a while, it wouldn’t be fair to accuse him of having gotten lazy, since even the most ambitious exerciser probably doesn’t want to have to figure out how to fold sudden monkey ambushes into their workout program.

At around 3:30 in the afternoon on January 9, a man in his 30s was jogging in the Kamihachiman-cho neighborhood of Tokushima City, Tokushima Prefecture. As he was running, he was surprised by a wild monkey, roughly 50 centimeters (19.7 inches) tall, which grabbed him by the legs.

▼ Though not far from the ocean, Kamihachiman-cho has some quite mountainous and forested topography.

Though startled, the man was able to shake the monkey off. While wild monkey sightings aren’t exceptionally rare in Japan, it’s unusual for them to approach/attack people like this. Often confrontations between humans and wild animals are triggered by the animals feeling like their territory is being encroached upon, so leaving the area is usually enough to settle the matter, and so the man kept on running…only to find that the monkey was now chasing him.

The monkey didn’t just follow for a few strides as a quick show of dominance, either. According to the man’s estimate, it chased him for roughly 500 meters, or roughly a third of a mile.

Eventually the monkey, either feeling like it had defended its territory or gotten in a sufficient workout, broke off its pursuit and withdrew into the forest, and luckily the man sustained no injuries from the encounter. However, as the incident comes just four days after a man was bitten on the legs by a wild monkey in the neighboring Tokushima City district of Hachimancho-cho, it seems at least one, and possibly two, primates are showing increased aggressiveness towards human residents, and the local police are urging caution.

Source: Yomiuri Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
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