By Elisabeth Gish | Project Leader
As you know, we have a lot of mouths to feed at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre and we like to make your donations go as far as possible! Every day our driver, Khem, navigates Phnom Penh traffic and congested construction sites along Highway 2 to deliver food to the Centre’s 1,000+ wild animals. We’ve routinely repaired the aging food delivery truck since we bought it second-hand, years ago – but it’s struggling now to make the 38-kilometer trip. Our goal is to keep all our animals fed by raising $38,000 for a new food delivery truck by the end of 2021. And today is the best possible time to help us achieve this aim because GlobalGiving will match all online donations made Giving Tuesday, November 30 from 00:01AM-11:59PM (Eastern Time), from their $1 MILLION Incentive Fund! Please donate today to Help Care for Rescued Wildlife in Cambodia to get more bananas for your buck and help buy a new food delivery truck.
This report contains a few highlights from 2021 – if you’d like to see more, please check out our Facebook page where we’ll be livestreaming from Phnom Tamao every 4-hours throughout Giving Tuesday! Fabulous Tour Guide Alicia will run 38-km around the Centre (5.5 km every 4-hours) and our team will livestream clips from Phnom Tamao so you can see the animals and enjoy the action.
Your support this year has been vital to continuing our work to care for animals rescued from the illegal wildlife trade. Measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic were much more severe here in 2021 – but rest assured, we rose to these new challenges and none of our animals went without! We sourced new vendors and navigated police checkpoints to ensure the food truck arrived each day, and shared the workload as Keepers had to take time off to quarantine. The number of arrivals and releases has been lower than in other years due to fewer seizures by the Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team, but there has been plenty to keep us busy and to celebrate at the Centre. In the first 9 months of 2021, your donations enabled us to:
You-bee and the other orphaned black-shanked douc langurs that were rescued and hand-raised last year continue to thrive. They now live in an enclosure custom-built for them near the Elephant section so they remain close to Keepers Sol and Vok who hand-raised them. In January 2021, they were joined by a fifth baby male douc, You-E, who has been integrated with the troupe. While all are humanized and will never be suitable for release, in the future we may be able to captive-breed and release their offspring to bolster wild populations of this Critically Endangered species.
Our 4 resident elephants are well. Female Lucky and disabled male Chhouk continue to share an enclosure and play together. These games often end up with Chhouk’s prosthetic shoe getting damaged. But the Cambodian School of Prosthetics and Orthotics are always ready to conduct the necessary repairs, which are becoming more expensive as Chhouk gets bigger. In January 2021, our other male, Sakor, became unwell. We medicated him and the others with anti-parasitic treatment and he made a full recovery. He shares his enclosure with female Jamran, who is a solid citizen. She is sturdy enough for Sakor’s occasional prods with his tusks not to bother her and we have never feared for her safety. However, Sakor is having more frequent bouts of musth, when he decides to rearrange his enclosure, and repairs are costing around $10,000/year!
Your support has been critically important to our ongoing operations this year because our ‘Behind The Scenes’ Tour was again suspended due to the severe community outbreak from February-September 2021. But with recent reductions in transmissions and travel restrictions, 2022 is looking a little brighter and we hope to see some of you next year!
Thank you all so much! Stay safe!
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