Indochina's primates face extinction

Indochina's primates face extinction

By Denis D. Gray

DEY AMBIL, Cambodia (AP): Within eyesight of a sign urging
"Don't sell wildlife," a roadside vendor is peddling four slow
lorises -- little primates with sad luminous eyes -- to be burned
alive and churned into purported Chinese medicine.

A gibbon, says Sem Sovan, can be ordered for US$200 and
delivered while customers wait at his ramshackle hut, squirming
with snakes, mynah birds and other illegal "products" from nearby
Kirirom National Park.

Once an Eden for primates, Cambodia along with neighboring
Vietnam and Laos, are being rapidly emptied of these creatures by
meat poachers, traditional medicine merchants and villagers
encroaching on their ranges.

Remarkably, not a single species of primates, man's closest
relative in the animal kingdom, was lost in the last century. But
global extinction is looming, and it is likely to occur first in
Indochina, says Frank Momberg of Fauna and Flora International.

Four of the 25 apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates listed
by the U.S.-based Conservation International as possibly facing
extirpation are found in Vietnam.

Only some 100 individuals on a single island remain of the Cat
Ba Island golden-headed langur while less than 200 Tonkin snub-
nosed monkeys, hunted for the medicine trade, hang on in two
areas of Vietnam, Momberg says. Almost as vulnerable are
Delacour's langur and the gray-shanked douc langur.

"The chances of them seeing the end of the century are slim,"
he says of the Hainan gibbon, perhaps the world's most endangered
primate which lives in a few scattered places in Vietnam and on
the Chinese island of Hainan. A tiny gene pool -- less than 50
individuals -- survives.

To avert extinction, conservationists stress, there must be
active population management, including captive breeding, and
above all safe, sufficiently large natural habitat - a shrinking
commodity throughout Indochina.

Even the Cardamon Mountains of southwestern Cambodia, long
protected by war, malaria and their remote location, are
threatened along with what is probably the world's largest
population of pileated gibbon.

Preliminary surveys show the mountains shelter several hundred
to 1,000 of these gibbons, whose haunting songs once frequently
resounded through the jungles of Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. Now
they are often death warrants.

Ian Baird, a Canadian conservationist, recalls hearing a
female singing one dawn in the Cardamons, a hunter tracking the
sound, then silence.

Baird witnessed the subsequent "processing," the animal's skin
sold, the meat eaten and the bones used for so-called medicine.
Adult gibbons are also killed so their babies can be easily
snatched for pets.

Momberg, Indochina program manager at Fauna and Flora
International, hopes he has found one formula for salvation.

In a mountain forest of northern Vietnam, the England-based
FFI is seeking to preserve the western black crested gibbon by
involving a half dozen poor tribal villages in their fate.

"A reserve is not enough. We need the communities," Momberg
says. "If the community doesn't want to care for them that's the
end."

Momberg wants the villagers around the Che Thao forest to
establish the boundaries of the reserve and select the rangers. A
weekly radio program, which includes conservation news, has been
started and former wildlife traders have been converted to
teachers.

"These people don't know they are harboring a gibbon that
exists nowhere else," he says. "But they can develop a pride that
they are hosting the only population in the world."

A mortal danger to these gibbons and other primates in
Indochina is the area's proximity to China, where the appetite
for exotic meat, medicine and aphrodisiacs seems insatiable, and
growing as the country's economic prosperity increases.

Thousands of primates which once chattered and sang in
Indochina's jungles are reduced to powdered bones, dried feet,
blood and wine concoctions and monkey brains on Chinese plates.

In the sweltering, pungent bowels of Phnom Penh's Chinatown,
around Orasay Market, skins of slow lorises lie artistically
draped over jute bags in open-fronted shops. Sem Sovan, the
wildlife vendor, says he sells about 10 a month to Chinese
medicine traders in the Cambodian capital for US$50 a piece.

He says that burning them alive increases the potency of the
medicine, and drinking their blood mixed with rice wine is great
for stomach aches.

On the Net: International Primate Protection League:
http://www.ippl.org Fauna and Flora International:
http://www.fauna-flora.org