The International Primate Protection League in the UK is planning to boycott tourism to Gibraltar over plans to cull 25 of its emblematic macaque monkeys.

The enclave's monkey population had been kept under control by the British army for decades, but a notable decline in troops, coinciding with greater environmental awareness, has seen an explosion in monkey numbers over the last twenty years, fed (literally) by a corresponding sharp rise in tourism.

Franco Ostuni, who is the general director of the Hotel Caleta, where a number of residents have had their rooms ransacked by hungry monkeys scavenging for extra food, defended the government's primate population control initiative by pointing out that those seeking to protect the monkeys do not have to live with the associated "health risks" and their "destructive tendencies."

For his part, local Tourism minister, Ernest Britto, explained that the extermination of a pack of 25 especially troublesome monkeys from Catalana and Sandy Bays has already been approved and said yesterday that two monkeys have already been put down - using a lethal injection of chemicals.