Hubballi: Residents of Surashettikoppa Kalghatigi Village Taluk were surprised when a female monkey, also a new mother, died after a contact with an electric wire living here recently.
The villagers, in a rare empathy show, conducted the last ceremony from public langur and took the procession to lament death.
They also took care of the two babies, who refused to stay away from the mother’s body.
“We blocked the monkey, paying our respect, bringing it in the procession and craming it near a Hanuman temple in their village according to the Hindu ritual which is generally carried out during the last ritual of the human being,” Shankarayya Hiratha said, a farmer in the village.
The incident was revealed after the village residents’ videos tried to separate children from dead mothers to be viral on social media.
Kalghatigi Range Forest Officer Shrikant Patil said that he received information about the dead and two children on Monday night.
“We went to the place and separated children from dead mothers and took them to the center in Kalghiragi,” he added.
“The children seemed to be 7 to 8 days old.
Even though it fell from above with their mother, they had not suffered an injury,” he added.
After observing them for two days, they were released in a forest area near Tambur Village in Kalghatigi which had a large population of ordinary langurs.
Surashettikoppa Gram Panchayat President Santosh Hosamani said: “When it rains down and we have to wait for a forest official to reach the place to take the children, we don’t bring it in a large procession.
We took it to the Hanuman temple after forest officials took children, and then after Do all the rituals, we buried it there.
That is a heartbreaking incident, “he added.