Filed under: Orangutan stories
Erik Meijaard , Jakarta
They are “the people of the forest” and the face of Indonesian conservation. The orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra are uniquely beautiful, undeniably compelling, and incredibly endangered.
These precious creatures should be well protected as a cultural icon and as an endangered species. But not nearly enough is being done to save our orangutans. The time to act is now, or this precious animal will be lost forever.
Protective measures are long overdue. Orangutan conservation was only seriously undertaken in the 1970s, with the focus simply on habitats in Sumatra’s and Kalimantan’s national parks. It soon became clear that wasn’t enough.
Orangutans started to show up in captivity. They were subsequently confiscated, and because there were no proper facilities to house them in, the first rehabilitation centers were established to remove orangutans from illegal captivity and trade. Intended as a temporary solution, it was expected that after a few years, there would be no need for the centers. But reality proved otherwise. In the last 25 years, the few hundred orangutans in captivity are now numbering in the thousands, driven to these centers as the world in which they lived began rapidly disappearing.
As the forests of Indonesia have vanished, so have their precious residents. The Indonesian media estimated that one thousand orangutans were killed last year because of fires and habitat loss. A more long-term look is even more disturbing: In the last 35 years, orangutan habitat in East Kalimantan alone has shrunk to 800,000 hectares from six million hectares and as many as fifty thousand orangutans are estimated to have been lost in that province alone. These numbers show that orangutan conservation has largely failed in Indonesia, and the orangutan is now one of the most threatened species.
What is the reason for such failure? Poor forest management and land use allocation, for starters, in addition to a lack of law enforcement, corrupt practices, and incompetent governance. This has happened both inside and outside the national parks and other protected areas. Clearly, the strategies that have been developed for orangutan conservation have not worked.
It is difficult to believe this could happen to a species that is strictly protected by Indonesian law. Part of the problem is that those laws are not applied consistently. And even though killing orangutans and other protected species is clearly prohibited by laws such as Law No. 5/1990, it appears that more protection is needed.
After checking many forestry laws, and talking to government officials, I have come to the conclusion that there is no law that clearly prohibits the destruction of orangutan habitat. That’s why agro-business can be established in orangutan habitats; as long as the company does not directly kill or harm the orangutan in the process, the clear cutting of those habitats appears legal.
So the question remains: How can we save the orangutan?
Two threats need to be eliminated: The destruction of orangutan habitat — the forests — and the killing of orangutans themselves.
We will need a cooperative effort. Gunung Leuser and Tanjung Puting are proof that not all national parks must lose their tall forests. Those with significant support from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) fare better than those without.
The successes in orangutan conservation also appear to be linked to effective partnerships between local stakeholders with real commitment to forest conservation were built. It doesn’t really seem to matter whether these stakeholders are from the local government, local communities, or the private sector. What matters is whether they care about conservation. And often, a focus on the forest and its economic and ecological value, rather than on orangutans, appears to be a key to success.
The solution to preventing the extinction of orangutans lies in combining all these approaches, with the focus on two important areas:
Firstly, we need new legislation that prohibits the destruction of the habitat of protected species. The use of such forests might be allowed, but the user has the responsibility to ensure that populations do not decline.
Secondly, forests need to be managed so that threats can be abated. Such effective forest management requires real commitment, an investment from a range of stakeholders, and effective control, either by government or an independent organization,
We need to increase collaboration to become a more effective force that ensures these changes will happen. The orangutan conservation community of today is fragmented with inter-personal and inter-organizational competition preventing it from becoming a strong force. If we can unite as a community, we will represent an enormous national and international force and millions of dollars of funding for orangutan conservation. We must put aside our differences and recognize how we can effectively work together.
If we speak with one strong, clear voice, we will influence government and enact sound policy, giving Indonesia’s orangutans a chance to survive. But if we don’t, our “people of the forest” will be forever silenced.
The writer works as senior forest ecologist at The Nature Conservancy. He can be contacted at emeijaard@tnc.org . The views expressed here are his own.
Filed under: Uncategorized
KINSHASA, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Congolese rebels have shot and butchered a rare mountain gorilla, raising fears for a tiny population that has clung on through years of warfare in central Africa, conservationists said on Wednesday. Just 700 mountain gorillas survive, more than half of them in Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The east of the country bore the brunt of a 1998-2003 war and humanitarian disaster that has killed some 4 million people. “In a population this small, every individual counts — and the loss of a trusting young silverback is tragic on many levels,” Ian Redmond, chief consultant for the United Nations Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP), said in a statement. Adult male gorillas are known as silverbacks because of their grey colouring. The statement was issued by Nairobi-based conservation group Wildlife Direct which supports gorilla protection efforts in Virunga, Africa’s oldest national park and a United Nations World Heritage Site. Wildlife Direct accused fighters loyal to renegade Congolese general Laurent Nkunda of shooting the silverback last week, and said they ordered a local farmer to help butcher it. Primates and other mammals are prized in parts of Africa as “bush meat”. “The future survival of this species is now under threat, and I fear that this recent attack on the gorillas could signal a wave of such killings if immediate action is not taken to remove Nkunda’s and his troops from their habitat,” Robert Muir, of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, said in the statement. Wildlife Direct said the gorilla had been one of a group which were used to humans because of regular trips by tourists before the war broke out. Congo held landmark elections last year, but militia violence continues in eastern areas. Conservation efforts have helped the mountain gorilla population grow by 14 percent since the war began. Wildlife Direct said the gorilla was killed just 600 metres (yards) from one of several patrol posts which rangers abandoned in November due to attacks and looting by Nkunda’s fighters. Some 97 rangers have been killed since 1997 protecting Virunga from poachers, it said. The park spans Congo, Rwanda and Uganda and is home to 380 mountain gorillas. The other population, of 320, is in the nearby Bwindi National Park in Uganda.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Mountain gorillas in Virunga Park do not face a threat from Ebola, a senior official with Rwanda Office of Tourism and National Parks (ORTPN), has said.Fidel Ruzigandekwe, the Executive Director of Rwanda Wildlife Authority, a department under ORTPN, said on Monday that the primates are not endangered as those in the Congo basin region.
He was reacting to a recent report published in a US science journal, which said that over 5,000 lowland gorillas in Central Africa had died from Ebola over the past five years.
“The disease was reported in lowland gorillas in the Congo basin but the gorillas in the region are not under threat,” Ruzigandekwe told The New Times on Monday. The mountain gorillas are shared between Rwanda, Uganda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The Congo basin which covers DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic is located about 2000 kilometres from the Virunga Mist, home to hundreds of the Mountain gorillas.
Ruzigandekwe said there are both regional and international efforts to prevent the deadly disease from spreading to the apes.
He said that one of the existing efforts was that of the Mountain Gorilla Health Contingence Plan (MGHCP), which is shared by the three countries, which checks for possible disease outbreaks in the Virunga Mist.
“We (ORTPN) have alerted our DRC and Uganda counterparts about Ebola in the Congo basin, and we are watching the situation closely together,” said Ruzigandekwe.
According to science journal published last week, two scientists Dr. Peter D. Walsh and Dr. Stuart Nichol said that from October 2002 to January 2003, about 130 out of the 143 gorillas they ’studied simply disappeared.’
Also, they said that 91 of 95 gorillas reportedly died from October 2003 to January 2004 and estimated that by 2005 Ebola had killed over 3,500 gorillas in the region since it was first recorded in 1976.
‘A lot of animals are dying’, said Dr. Walsh, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Primatology in Germany, one of authors of the report. ‘All the major parks in the DRC have serious hunting and poaching problems.’
It’s a slippery slope. Ebola is pushing the gorillas onto it, and other factors are pushing them down it,’ the report quotes him as saying.
The New Times (Kigali)
Filed under: Uncategorized
LOSSI SANCTUARY, Congo, Dec. 11 (UPI) — Newly published data links the deaths of more than 5,000 gorillas and chimpanzees in Africa to outbreaks of the deadly Ebola virus.
The research led by Magdalena Bermejo of the University of Barcelona was conducted in a closely monitored Congo gorilla population where genetic tests confirmed Ebola as the cause of death.
Bermejo and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Sweden’s Uppsala University, first showed 93 percent of individually known gorillas at the Lossi Sanctuary in northwest Congo near the Gabon border were killed by Ebola in 2002 and 2003 outbreaks. They then used transect surveys to show 95 percent gorilla mortality rates extended over a much larger area of several thousand square miles.
Chimpanzees were also affected, with a mortality rate of 77 percent.
Lossi was only one of several large gorilla and chimpanzee die-offs caused by Ebola during the last 12 years, and scientists said accurate figures on exactly how many apes have died are not yet available, but might affect as much as 25 percent of the Earth’s gorilla population.
The study appears in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Science.
Filed under: Chimpanzee Welfare
December 7, 2006
According to animal trainer Sid Yost of Amazing Animal Actors, which rents out animals for use in TV and movies, Angel, Apollo, Sable and Cody are four healthy and happy chimpanzees living at his Ranch in San Bernardino. He previously stated that “we pride ourselves on taking special care of our animal actors. All our animal actors are treated with respect, kindness and love.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Cody, Sable and Apollo came from the notorious Coulston Foundation (TCF) which previously housed the largest colony of captive chimpanzees for the purposes of biomedical research before it was closed down after been found guilty of appalling animal abuse. Angel is the only chimp at the ranch that was acquired from a zoo in California.
Cody, Sable, Angel and Apollo who have appeared in numerous TV shows, commercials and movies including “That ’70s Show” and “The Craig Kilborn Show,” were named in a federal lawsuit alleging cruelty by their California trainer Sid Yost.
In November 2005 in Riverside California the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), along with the Chimpanzee Collaboratory and three other plaintiffs, filed a complaint in U.S. District Court this morning against Hollywood chimpanzee “trainer” Sid Yost for violating the Endangered Species Act and the California anti-cruelty statute by subjecting the chimpanzees in his possession to extreme pain and suffering. Co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including primatologist Sarah Baeckler, who worked with Yost for more than a year, have witnessed him repeatedly abuse several chimpanzees by violently beating them with sticks, punching them with his fists, and inflicting excessive pain on them in order to force them to perform for movie and television appearances.
According to Baeckler she witnessed first-hand five young chimpanzee “actors” horrifying regime of abuse. She stated that “If the chimpanzees try to run away from a trainer, they are beaten. If they bite someone, they are beaten. If they don’t pay attention, they are beaten. Sometimes they are beaten without any provocation or for things that are completely out of their control,” She witnessed daily abuse of the chimpanzees. Baeckler described how it is impossible to train chimpanzees to perform in the manner required in the entertainment industry without abusing them.
At last under new settlement terms, Sable, Cody and Angel will leave Yost’s San Bernardino, California, facility on Saturday for sanctuaries in New Mexico and Florida. Maybe these poor animals can finally get a chance to be chimpanzees……
Please encourage filmmakers to use alternatives to the use of live great apes in productions. The use of computer-generated images, blue-screen technology, costumed actors, stock footage, and animatronics are viable alternatives that can and should be used by the film industry.
Filed under: Orangutan stories
Apes to be returned to Indonesia this week
Forty-eight orangutans smuggled into the country from Indonesia are set to be returned on Wednesday, officials said yesterday. The endangered apes have been waiting for months to return home since veterinarians confirmed they were captured in the wild in Indonesia and not born in captivity as their Thai owners had claimed.
The apes were seized from Safari World Zoo in Bangkok in a raid after forestry police and environmental groups suspected the orangutans had been smuggled into Thailand from northern Sumatra.
All of the animals have had medical check-ups and are in good health and ready to be sent back, said Pornchai Pratumratnatan, chief of Khao Pratap Chang Wildlife Rescue Centre in Ratchaburi province.
Thai wildlife officials are waiting for their Indonesian counterparts to send more cages for the apes, he said, warning that the transfer had to be carried out with great care to avoid causing the animals too much stress. The wildlife rescue centre has served as temporary shelter for the apes since 2005 while a team of Indonesian veterinarians conducted DNA tests on the animals to identify their origins. The test results contradicted the zoo’s earlier claim that many of the orangutans were born in captivity.
Forestry police have already charged the zoo owner for illegally possessing the orangutans. The zoo once had 101 orangutans in its possession. However, in 2004 nearly
half of them died under suspicious circumstances.
The zoo owner claimed they died from pneumonia but police suspected they may have been moved or killed ahead of a police inspection at the zoo.
Meanwhile, four koalas given to Thailand by Australia are set to arrive at Chiang Mai airport on Wednesday and be taken to Chiang Mai Zoo, said Sophon Damnui, director-general of the Zoological Park Organisation. Zoo officials are preparing eucalyptus varieties and a new shelter for the cuddly marsupials to make them feel at home, he said. The shelter, which will be open to the public from early next month, has been designed to imitate their native environment.
Bangkok Post
Filed under: Interesting Chimp Stories
By Charles Q Choi (LiveScience)
Males prefer older females, at least in the chimp world scientists now report.
These findings, reported in the Nov. 21 issue of the journal Current Biology, could shed light on how the more chimp-like ancestors of humans might have behaved, said researcher Martin Muller, a biological anthropologist at Boston University.
Human men often prefer young women. One reason for this, scientists propose, lies in the human proclivity to form unusually long-term mating pairs. When combined with the natural urge to beget as many children as possible, since a woman’s fertility is limited by age, men would find young women more sexually attractive.
Chimpanzees, unlike humans, do not form mating partnerships for long, and are instead promiscuous. Moreover, female chimps show no evidence of menopause, which means their fertility is not limited by age. This suggested male chimps might not care about the age of a mate as humans do.
Older is better
To test this prediction, Muller and his colleagues at Harvard investigated chimpanzees at Kibale National Park in Uganda for eight years.
“It takes a lot of effort to find them in the forest and to follow them through a lot of thick vegetation and to try and record all this,” Muller recalled.
Surprisingly, the scientists found male chimps preferred older females. Males approached older females more often for sex, and preferred clustering around older females that were in heat. Older females also had sex more frequently with high-ranking males and more regularly triggered male-on-male aggression during mating contests.
“The stereotypical view of human mating involves males wanting to be promiscuous and females being coy, but in chimps you see young females being very interested in mating with all the males, maybe going male to male and presenting their sexual swellings, sometimes grabbing their penis and playing with them, and the males just ignore them,” Muller told LiveScience.
Reasons unclear
It remains uncertain as to why male chimps would prefer older females, as opposed to not caring about age at all.
“Hormonal data collected noninvasively from urine samples suggest older females are more fecund. Perhaps this is a matter of their higher rank— older females tend to be dominant over younger ones, which gives them preferred access to the best foods, so they may be more likely to conceive,” Muller said.
In addition, the older females get, the more fit they might show themselves to be against the hardships of life, and thus could lead to equally robust children, which males could find attractive. Alternatively, older females might have accumulated mothering experience, leading to increased infant survivorship. “Or it might be any combination of these, or all of them,” Muller said.
To tease out why exactly human men favor young women and chimp males prefer older females, Muller suggested researching what other primate males look for, such as gibbons, who like humans form long-term mating pairs but like chimps do not have menopause.
Filed under: Interesting Chimp Stories
Regardless of stiff international regulations, a chimpanzee cartel thrives on the back of demand from private zoos and leading hotels.
It all started in January last year. A crate of five chimpanzees arrived in Kenya’s Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary after it was confiscated at Nairobi airport. The crate originally carried six chimpanzees – out of which one died – and four monkeys.
Jason Mier, who is a chimpanzee activist, was concerned that such a large shipment of primates was even put together and, he then commenced, what he describes as, an alarming investigation.
The crate, which weighed 64 kg began its air travel from Kano in Nigeria and was heading to Cairo via Khartoum.
However, on arrival in the Egyptian capital, it was refused entry and ordered to return to Lagos on a flight via Nairobi, where it was finally confiscated and directed to the sanctuary in Kenya.
“It was pretty shocking to see the chimps, as the babies arrived packed in this crate and were all stressed and dehydrated without food or water for days. We’ve also heard that there were two gorillas in the crate but don’t know that for sure and have no idea what happened to them,” he told Weekend Review when he stopped over for a few hours in Dubai recently.
Fast disappearing
The concern emanates from the fact that chimpanzees and gorillas are endangered species according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and that their illegal smuggling is resulting in the rapid depletion of the primates in their countries of origin.
If, at the start of the last century, there were up to 1.5 million chimpanzees in the African wild, Mier estimates there are a maximum of 200,000 left now. “They’ve been completely wiped out in four West African countries,” he says.
Mier, who is 27, moved from the US to dedicate his life to working with primates. He gets extremely agitated at the threat that man is posing to, what he calls, the great apes of Africa.
With demand for bush meat increasing, chimpanzee and gorilla meat, he says, is highly sought after and many primates are killed mercilessly in Cameroon. “It is the surviving orphaned babies of these animals that find their way into countries in the Middle East,” Mier says. “Not only is this scary from the wildlife point of view, but by consuming bush meat, there is an increasing risk of introducing new and different strains of disease into the human population.”
Along with associate Karl Ammann, Mier plunged into the investigation that unravelled details of what the “Cairo Connection” was, the results of which has been made into a 27-minute documentary titled Ape Smuggling – The Cairo Connection. “We found that the crate was not listed on the cargo manifest or the passenger manifest, but was travelling with an Egyptian passport holder, Ahmad Ebrahim Abdul Shafy. Also, on that flight, the only other person travelling the same Kano-Khartoum-Cairo route was an Egyptian lady, Heba Abdul Moty Ahmad Saad, who is widely known as a wildlife smuggler,” he recalls.
On its return flight to Lagos, via Nairobi, on a Kenya Airways flight, the cargo was listed as accompanying baggage – and not animals, as is required by procedure – under a different passenger’s name who, as it turned out, was Heba’s daughter. The crate was subsequently confiscated in Nairobi after a Kenyan government vet took the decision to do so because there were no documents from the airline and no address, name or markings on the crate.
Airlines’ apathy
Mier and Ammann suspected that the crate they had been exposed to was a freak incident of bad timing for the smugglers and that there must have been many more attempts that were probably successful. As they dug around for more information, the two discovered that there had been numerous shipments of undocumented wildlife, many warning letters from the Cairo Airport Authority and that Kenya Airways had been a prime carrier of the animals, shipping out undocumented for wildlife in inappropriate containers.
“What really bothered us was that such shipments could be accepted and handled by international airlines, which can actually play a huge role in preventing illegal wildlife trade. We have all the evidences of these trips and the various correspondences with the airline, including the letters of denial from their side despite our writing to them supplementing it with our findings,” Mier says, showing scanned copies of the proof on a compact disk.
The next logical step for them was to visit Cairo to find out what was prompting the heightened activity in chimp smuggling. Funding for this fact-finding exercise has rarely come from outside as it often comes with conditionalities.
“We can’t name and shame certain organisations as they are patrons of the donor foundation,” Mier says. Using their own finances and risking the use of a hidden camera to validate their documentary, Mier and Ammann concluded that it stemmed from a growing trend of displaying exotic fauna. Private zoos or roadside zoos were not uncommon and were even openly advertised by leading hotels on their websites, who were unafraid of flouting CITES regulations.
On their trips, they found and saw 26 chimpanzees and four gorillas and Mier says he won’t be surprised if there are more. Thanks to CITES, Mier explains that it’s now possible to trace the source of the trade as all endangered species are required to have trade records.
“But the primates in Egypt have no track-back papers. In the resort of Sharm Al Shaikh, there are two chimpanzees locked up in a private zoo, with a baby that’s not even a year old, alone in a dark cave. These are animals that are used to playing freely out in the wild and are now reduced to living in appalling conditions,” he says, running me through photographs of the chimps.
“This is the place that Tony Blair visits and stays in,” he adds.
However, their investigation was not without trouble as they were asked to leave the hotel when the culprits caught a whiff of what the two men were trying to unearth.
“There was another private zoo that hides a collection of apes – 11 chimps and two gorillas, of which, one has a CITES permit. “To smuggle a gorilla, the owner writes for a permit. Papers are issued only in Arabic, which goes against CITES regulations that require papers to be issued or accompanied by copies in English, Spanish or French.”
Convinced of a strong Cairo link, Mier and Ammann searched for further documentary evidence and found more flight manifests that revealed more shipments to Cairo and other parts of the Middle East. It also emerged that Heba and her daughters are key players in trading illegal wildlife, going back as far as 27 years.
“Bribing Nigerian officials for export documents that describe them as monkeys and not as chimps or gorillas makes things easier and it helps that Heba’s husband runs a transport business with offices in Nigeria, Cameroon and Cairo,” he says.
To complete their investigation, Mier headed out to Kano and spoke to a couple of dealers including the doorman at Heba’s house, who, Mier says, offered to sell him a chimp for $350, as opposed to another offer of sale in Cairo for $5,000. He adds that if one were to go straight to the source in the Cameroon village, a chimpanzee can be bought for as less as $50.
Mier says that Heba is now well settled in Cairo. Her neighbours in Nigeria and most people are aware of her dealings. On investigating the whereabouts and details of the man, Abdul Shafy, who was transporting the crate of six chimps, Mier found that Heba and her daughters were linked to Shafy, who is a paediatrician. “Many of the CITES and quarantine officials told us that he uses chimps for tissue and organ transplants,” he reveals.
Having worked with chimpanzees in close proximity, Mier says that they are fun to interact with and are interesting animals. But he is dead against the idea of using them as fashion statements. “I don’t have a problem if, for instance, a confiscated chimpanzee is cared for in an approved sanctuary. But it becomes a problem when primates are hunted purely to satisfy someone’s need for entertainment,” he says.
Toothless organisation
In the entire process, CITES, he believes, has come out as a rather toothless organisation that is not in a position to enforce its regulations even in countries that have signed up.
“They just told us that it’s up to the signatory countries. Now, that’s going to require a great deal of political will and how willing are governments in Cameroon, Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya going to be?” he asks.
With the documentary close to completion at the time of the interview, Mier is on the urgent lookout to get it beamed to as many viewers possible.
“Sensitising viewers on the one hand, but more importantly, to initiate some serious action against open violators of wildlife acts and efforts.”
“It’s not personal,” he says of the documentary that focuses on a couple of names and organisations. “It just so happens that it’s one case study that was investigated further to reveal quite a bit. I’m sure there are other flouters and smugglers. As an animal lover and activist, I’d like to see all illegal trade of wildlife stopped. That’s all.”
The role CITES plays
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is a global agreement between member states and aims to make sure that international trade of animal and plant life does not threaten their existence.
As cross border trade of wildlife involves different countries an arrangement between countries was required to facilitate international cooperation to protect over-exploitation. The CITES website states that it offers varying degrees of protection to more than 30,000 species of animals and plants, whether they are traded as live specimens, fur coats or dried herbs.
Enforced in 1975, CITES is not a substitute for national laws. It is legally binding on the signatory parties, however, is primarily a framework within which countries have to adopt and enforce their own national regulations to make it successful in its mission.
It now has 169 countries that have signed up as CITES parties.
Smuggling continues
Follow-up trip reveals no change in situation
Following his meeting with Weekend Review, Jason Mier undertook a follow-up trip to Egypt to investigate if the situation had improved. “Far from it,” he told us after returning to his base in Kenya. “While I would be happy to say nothing has changed meaning there is no more smuggling and the appearance of new animals has stopped, I must instead say nothing has changed in the fact that on every single trip – including this one – there are more and more chimpanzees and other animals on display and offered for sale,” he says.
Mier has written to the CITES Secretariat informing them specifically of his observations. On an earlier trip last November to the Hauza Hotel in Sharm Al Shaikh, he found that the owner Ashraf Enab had two chimpanzees, with some of the employees stating he had more at home. The hotel’s website was later updated with pictures of a new chimpanzee. “Hotel travel reports on other websites indicated that he had young chimpanzees which were now available as photographic props,” he says in his letter to CITES. “These are kept in three separate groups, the two oldest chimpanzees together, then one individual kept by himself in a completely closed room with no sunlight. They are kept in human baby clothing, and for 5 euros any visitor can have a picture taken with them.”
Mier met with Dr Talaat Sedrak, the CITES representative in Egypt, and informed him of the findings. Mier says that according to Dr Sedrak, the Egyptian CITES authorities have given no permission to anyone or any facility to hold any apes other than the Giza zoo, the Alexandria zoo and to Gamal Omar/Tower Hotel to house until a suitable facility can be found – not own – only eight chimpanzees and one gorilla.
“He [Dr Sedrak] asked why Gamal Omar’s facility could not be a sanctuary and all apes sent there. I stated that as I felt that Gamal Omar and his son were smugglers, and with the extremely bad conditions and secrecy in which the animals are kept, it would be inappropriate for this to be considered a sanctuary. He ‘corrected’ me in saying that Gamal Omar does not actually bring the animals into the country, but instead only buys them from the people which smuggle them in. He did not seem to appreciate my reasoning that if he is allowed to buy up smuggled apes that he is creating the problem, not solving it,” Mier tells us and writes to the CITES officials. “He also mentioned that he was well aware of Heba and her involvement in smuggling but there was nothing he could do.”
When Mier asked Dr Sadrek about when he would take action against Heba and her family and Dr Abdel Shafy, the CITES official said that there was nothing he could do as they were powerful people. On Mier’s suggestion that Dr Sadrek should resign in protest and explain to the CITES Secretariat why he quit, the Egyptian representative requested that Mier write a report to them asking the Secretariat to tell him what his responsibilities are under CITES.
Vinita Bharadwaj, Staff Writer (Gulf News)
Filed under: Interesting Chimp Stories
GOMBE NATIONAL PARK, Tanzania — One recent night, in the cabin Jane Goodall uses when she returns to the park where her work began, researchers discussed a new and astonishing finding: An older female chimp had recently taken her daughter’s newborn and was raising it as her own.
Researchers had previously witnessed terrible moments with newborns — older females in the group have killed some. But the decision by Gremlin, one of the matriarchs in the chimp population, to snatch away her daughter Gaia’s baby remained a mystery.
‘‘It could be a protective act,’’ said Bill Wallauer, an American from Oregon City, Ore., who has been videotaping Gombe’s chimps since 1993.
He said an older female chimp had appeared moments before Gremlin took the baby and hypothesized that Gremlin believed the baby would be safer with her. ‘‘But,’’ he added, ‘‘that still leaves a lot of questions.’’
‘‘Like, why was Gaia OK with it?’’ Kristin Mosher, an American from Oswego, N.Y., who photographs the animals for the institute, said. ‘‘And does Gaia try to get the baby back?’’
“It tells us that we still have a lot to learn and to see,’’ Wallauer said.
JOHN DONNELLY (THE BOSTON GLOBE)
Filed under: Uncategorized
Hello,
The aim of this blog is to give everyone access to news stories about Apes from all around the world. I would also like to encourage discussions and action through these stories.
“You don’t change the world by whispering.” Eliot Spitzer
