Help Care for Rescued Animals in Cambodia

This photo of Phnom Tamao keeper Sol hand-raising rescued douc langurs is a finalist in GlobalGiving’s 2021 Photo Contest! We’re excited to be in the running, and the prize money would go a long way at the rescue centre. Photos with the most votes can win up to $1,000! That would cover food for all of the baby animals in our Nursery for 1 month, or pay the salary of a douc langur keeper for 4 months.

Voting takes less than a minute: just click here to select our photo and confirm your choice via email. Please support us by casting your vote August 16-20th (Eastern Time)! Want to help us even more? Share our message with your network on social media or forward this email to a friend.

If you’ve been a Phnom Tamao supporter for a while, you may remember the story of these doucs from reading our reports over the past year. All of these douc langurs arrived at the Centre between February and May 2020 and each was just a few weeks old, frail and sickly when rescued. These beautiful, Critically Endangered primates are hunted for the wildlife trade, with parents generally killed and babies sold as pets. The species is extremely sensitive and notoriously difficult to raise in captivity. In the past, rescued baby doucs always died despite our best efforts. Normally baby animals are cared for in our Nursery section, but many juvenile macaques had also arrived around the same time and they often carry diseases that are harmless to them but can be fatal to other species. To avoid any risk to the baby doucs, our Head Keeper, Try Sitheng - who also snapped this photo contest finalist - suggested they instead be cared for in the Elephant section, far away from any macaques. Elephant keepers Vok and Sol stepped up to the task of bottle-feeding each baby douc every 2 hours! Today, the doucs have grown into a thriving juvenile troupe and they now live in a large enclosure with branches, ropes and swings as enrichment items to encourage natural behavior. Unfortunately, all of these orphaned doucs are humanized, so they cannot be returned to the wild but they have found both home and family the Centre. In the future, if they mate and raise their own young, their offspring may be suitable candidates for release.

Donations from GlobalGiving donors like you provide critical flexible funding that enables us to respond to the unpredictable costs and meet the surprising array of needs for animals like these doucs and thousands of others that arrive at the Centre every year. Thank you so much for your support – and please don’t forget to vote for us in the photo contest before August 20th!

Links:

• Vote now for our photo!

Despite Covid-19 wreaking havoc throughout Cambodia there has been no let up for us in new animals arriving at Phnom Tamao. Many of these have come in the form of babies. On June 26^th a veterinary clinic in Siem Reap brought a cage full of fruit bats they hand raised. The reason for this is extensive road work and alterations are being conducted in Siem Reap without regard for the wonderful trees that line the streets in the city, within which there are colonies of fruit bats. Many infant bats have fallen to the ground and been collected by caring passers-by and then handed in to veterinary clinics. The young bats that arrived on Saturday are now weaned and no longer need the bottle. We have placed them in one of our bird aviaries and hope to release them when they are a little bigger. I am suggesting that in the future, under similar circumstances, rather than being driven 370 kilometers to Phnom Tamao, the bats be soft released from their cages in Siem Reap, which should work fine.  

Other babies that have arrived are younger and many have required bottle feeding every two hours, which is giving our Nursery staff, Pisei, Ran and Par, sleepless nights. An extremely rare marbled cat kitten was confiscated by one of our forest ranger patrol teams in Botum Sakor in the Cardamom Mountains on June 19^th and brought to our Nursery. It was wild and frightened, but has settled down well and is now eating meat, so it should be out of the dangerous stage for rescued baby animals when they are still at risk of dying, which is a particularly high risk in the period immediately following the trauma of capture and transport.

A baby silvered langur was rescued by our Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team and although a little older, it still requires a bottle, as do 3 baby common palm civets which were wild-born at Phnom Tamao  and fell out of their nest in a tree during a wind storm.

However, the biggest headache we are getting at present comes in the tiny form of the many baby long-tailed and pig-tailed macaques that are stolen from their mothers by videographers and used for financial purposes, the new owners placing posts on social media in an attempt to attract viewers and hence money. There are currently 15 rescued infant macaques in our Nursery, many of these still requiring milk feeds every 2 hours, night and day. The problems do not stop once the babies are old enough to feed themselves. We still have to house them and decide the future for the endless tame monkeys that we receive, in part due to the fact that the laws governing the capture of these infants are not strong enough and penalties are rarely imposed when the babies are confiscated. 

I feel sympathy for Pisei and his colleagues in Nursery. I tell them to try to get the baby macaques feeding themselves as soon as possible and to cut down on the night feeds so they can get a little sleep themselves. Pisei replies that he would not do this and that in any case the babies wake up crying when they are hungry, which wakes up the keepers, so they have to get up anyway. We are blessed to have such dedicated keepers.

Your donations help to pay their salaries and feed all these baby animals and more – thank you so much for your support!