Help Rangers Protect Endangered Cambodian Wildlife

For wildlife in the Cardamoms, rangers mean the difference between life and death and your donations make their work possible! This Marbled Cat was rescued at just a few weeks old. She was weak, frightened and in urgent need of milk - but her mother was nowhere in sight.

The kitten was found after she wandered onto a farm. Luckily, the farmer turned her over to rangers who immediately transported her to Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre. There, keepers worked around the clock to provide critical milk and more, just like mama! Soon after, she was out of the danger zone and today she’s thriving!

While rangers routinely rescue animals like this Marbled Cat, her donation to rangers by a villager is the exception. Most animals are rescued from certain death in snares. Once set, snares are like ticking time bombs for wildlife: they catch and kill indiscriminately, meaning no animal is safe. Once caught, animals typically die in the snare or from the resulting infections after breaking free. But rangers make the forest safer by removing snares. In the first nine months of this year, rangers have removed over 19,000 snares, and rescued 271 live animals, including threatened species. Other lucky animals rescued this year include a Critically Endangered Sunda Pangolin donated by a villager, a Slow Loris confiscated from a poacher, and a Sun Bear released from a snare. Unlike the Marbled Cat, which will be hand-raised by Nursery keepers at Phnom Tamao until it is old enough to be released, all of these animals could be released immediately back into the forest because they were mature and in good health.

Besides the day to day rescues, our rangers have made great strides for wildlife, especially elephants. The Cardamom Rainforest Landscape is an important habitat for an estimated 400 Endangered Asian elephants. Since 2006, Wildlife Alliance rangers have achieved zero elephant poaching. What’s more, our remote cameras record herds of elephants moving through the forest with calves, an encouraging sign of breeding.

Your donations keep the Cardamoms safe for animals big and small! Thank you so much for your support!

The Wildlife Alliance ranger teams your donations support have been hard at work protecting the Cardamoms and its threatened wildlife – in the first half of 2021 they rescued a total of 199 live animals from poachers! Among the animals saved were a few of the rare Slow Loris.

The Bengal Slow Loris pictured above was rescued by rangers in May 2021. This guy or girl was lucky – it was found uninjured in a poacher’s sack and the rangers were able to release it back into the wild right away. As shown in this release video, it scampered up into the canopy as soon as the ranger placed it on the tree!

Slow Loris are nocturnal primates that have developed a unique response to predators: they can release venom! How does this work? There are 2 steps: first they secrete noxious oil from glands under their armpits. Second, Slow Loris lick those glands. When combined with the oil, the saliva forms a venom. 

Cambodia has two species of Slow Loris, the Bengal Slow Loris (Nycticebus bengalensis) and the Pygmy Slow Loris (Nycticebus pygmaeus), both of which are Endangered. Demand from the pet trade and traditional Asian Medicine are driving them to extinction. Since 2013, rangers have rescued a total of 48 Slow Lorises in the Cardamoms.

The pet Loris craze started online when videos, memes and images of Slow Lorises being kept as pets went viral. Unfortunately, the popularity of such content continues to fuel demand to keep them as pets, driving poachers to capture more Lorises from the wild in places like the Cardamoms. On top of this, online content featuring Lorises can encourage harmful behavior towards them. A paper that reviewed 100 such videos found that all showed at least 1 of 5 conditions known to be negative for Lorises (contact with humans or domestic animals, daylight, signs of stress or ill health, unnatural conditions, and isolation). In addition, the authors found that viewers were more likely to “like” videos where a slow loris was kept in the light or displayed signs of stress and conclude that the “prevalence of a positive public opinion of such videos” undermines conservation efforts.

In the Cardamom Rainforest, the other major threat to Slow Lorises is poaching for use in Asian traditional medicine. In Cambodia, Slow Loris is believed to treat a range of medical conditions, from leprosy to low fertility. For example, placing dried loris skin under the house is thought to increase a woman’s chances of getting pregnant. Such uses are unproven, and are a prescription for extinction.

Thank you for supporting ranger patrols that help ensure that Slow Loris, and so many other wildlife species, remain safely in the forest.

Links:

• Rangers release an Endangered Bengal Slow Loris!
• Paper assessing Slow Loris treatment in videos