By Elisabeth Gish | Grants Manager/Community Conservation Advisor
2022 has been a monumental year for our project at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre and GlobalGiving donors like you have contributed greatly to our work. From our successful campaign to save the forest surrounding the Centre from being razed to build a satellite city (details in the previous report if you missed that story) to managing care for hundreds of newly rescued animals arriving each month, to fully re-opening our ‘Behind The Scenes’ Tours to educate visitors about humane captive care for rescued wildlife, our team has been busier than ever this year. This report includes a summary of what we achieved since January with your donations and the upcoming needs we have identified as we look towards year-end and 2023.
In just the first 9 months of 2022, we:
As we reflect on these accomplishments, we are also looking towards improvements we can make to address challenges identified and ensure standards of care remain high. You may remember the douc langurs rescued from the illegal pet trade that we have been successfully hand-raising since 2020. Black-shanked and red-shanked douc langurs are both Critically Endangered, and all langur species are difficult to raise in captivity due to their delicate digestive systems and primarily leaf-eating diets. Doucs are particularly sensitive, rescued doucs arrive sickly and weak, and in the past they had always died despite our best efforts. We thought we had cracked the code on raising doucs by having our elephant keepers care for them far away from the Nursery, where staff must care for all species including many juvenile macaques that can carry diseases like Herpes that are harmless to their species but deadly for langurs.
Sadly, three of our hand-raised doucs passed away this year and more silvered langurs have died recently than in past years. To address this challenge, we plan to build a dedicated langur care facility, strengthen veterinary capacity at Phnom Tamao, and implement food quality testing for sensitive species to ensure the supposedly ‘organic’ vegetables we are specially purchasing for them are indeed chemical-free. We have secured funding to hire an international veterinary expert to help properly diagnose and treat tricky cases and to build the capacity of our dedicated local staff.
Our fundraising goal is to raise $10,000 to purchase medical equipment to upgrade our laboratory so we are better equipped to sterilize tools and feeding items, analyze blood samples ourselves rather than relying on external labs for testing, and assess chemical levels in food to improve animals’ diets.
If you are planning to make any year-end gifts, please donate on November 29th when you can help us earn a portion of GlobalGiving’s $1.2 MILLION USD Incentive Fund. All unique donations of up to $2,500 made November 29, 2022 from 12:01AM-11:59PM Eastern Time will be matched! To meet the match requirements each donation must be:
1) Made via GlobalGiving’s website during the campaign period.
2) Made by a unique individual with a distinct name, email, and payment account (only 1 donation per person will be matched, even if you give to multiple projects).
3) Donations must be made by the account or card holder.
4) Acceptable payment methods include: credit or debit card, Paypal, individually purchased GlobalGiving gift cards (corporate gift cards are ineligible), and M-Changa/M-Pesa.
The more we raise, the more matching funds we’ll receive!
Since Giving Tuesday last year, you and hundreds more GlobalGiving donors gave over $30,000 to care for rescued wildlife at Phnom Tamao and earned us an additional $7,500+ in matching funds during special campaigns!
We know many are facing economic hardship this year. If you are not in a position to give again, please help spread the word about our work by sharing this report with family and friends. As always, thank you so much for your support. Best wishes for the giving season.
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