At least they do in India, and it’s a particular problem in the city of Varanasi, which has been trying to upgrade its IT services and introduce street-level wifi throughout the city— but the macaques that live in and around the city’s many temples keep chewing through the fiber optic cables:

Varanasi is also home to hundreds of macaque monkeys that live in its temples and are fed and venerated by devotees.

But the monkeys also feast on the fibre-optic cables that are strung along the banks of the Ganges river.

“We cannot move the temples from here. We cannot modify anything here, everything is built up. The monkeys, they destroy all the wires and eat all the wires,” said communications engineer A.P. Srivastava.

Srivastava, who oversees the expansion of new connections in the local district, said his team had to replace the riverside cables when the monkeys chewed them up less than two months after they were installed.

He said his team is now looking for alternatives, but there are few to be found. The city of over 2 million people is impossibly crowded and laying underground cable is out of the question. Chasing away or trapping the monkeys will outrage residents and temple-goers.

Apparently animal-fiber optic conflict is not a new problem: in 2011 Level 3 Communications reported that 17% of its cable cuts were due to squirrels:

Of all the animals in the whole world, almost all of our animal damage comes from this furry little nut eater.  Squirrel chews account for a whopping 17% of our damages so far this year!  But let me add that it is down from 28% just last year and it continues to decrease since we added cable guards to our plant.  Honestly,   I don’t understand what the big attraction is or why they feel compelled to gnaw through cables.  Our guys in the field have given this some thought and jokingly suspect the cable manufacturers of using peanut oil in the sheathing.

Now there are car wires that apparently will be eaten by squirrels because they use delicious meant oil lubricant, but I don’t know if fiber optic really uses it too.