We bring you two regional updates in the world of monkeys.

One involving the bizarre murder case of the man in Dubai who was out walking his monkey … and the other a band of marauding monkeys who trashed the backyard of a co-worker.

First, the Death and the Walking Monkey story. I referred to this recently, but in short … a man was out walking his monkey (no, really), and he encountered another guy with whom he had been competing for the affections of a bar maid … and after insults were traded and an invitation to fight, the monkey-walker pummeled the second man, and he died of his injuries — which included his nose being bitten by the monkey-walker.

Well, the monkey-walker has been sentenced by a Dubai court to 10 years in prison for murder. (We move pretty quickly on the justice front, here in the UAE.) The National got this directly from the court records, and the court did not answer the nagging question: “What happened to the monkey?”

The second bit of monkey news comes from New Delhi, where our co-worker is The National’s India correspondent.

On her Facebook account, she told how a band of macaques came over her roof and drove her and her husband inside the house, and ate everything they could find, outside.

(The photo, above, was taken from inside the house.)

Our colleague wrote: “They ate the pomegranates, roses, eggplant, fenugreek and drank the remainder of the tea from the tea cups we abandoned in haste on the terrace. … After eating our fenugreek and eggplant, the monkey mocked me, grooming himself just out of reach of my stick.”

Followers suggested various remedies, most in jest, including “wrestling the taunting monkey to the death”.

Replied the husband: “The monkey had a scar over one eye like a Colombian drug kingpin. Hand-to-hand combat was out of the question.”

Ultimately, this is a serious story, as was that of the monkey-walker. Macaques are aggressive, liable to bite, are quite strong (even at 30 pounds or so) and carriers of disease. Considering that this was Delhi, the particular macaque probably was of the rhesus variety, which our link suggests have a larger area of habitation than any primate, aside from man.

In this story in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, it is revealed that monkey catchers are hard to find, and rounding up the thousands of macaques that roam the city is complicated by the difficulty of the task, and also by religious sentiment.

The story notes the death of a deputy mayor, from a fall, after he was attacked by monkeys while reading his morning paper.

Monkeys. One man’s best friend. Another’s enemy.