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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: October 2007

Conservationists give cover for Mauritian monkey sales to labs

 

PORT LEWIS, KUALA LUMPUR, HANOI--Nearly 500 years after Dutch sailors are believed to imported the first macaques to Mauritius, claims of a need to control them as an alleged invasive species have become a front line of defense for the booming Mauritian macaque export industry-- which captures some macaques from the wild, but breeds them in captivity to comply with U.S. and international laws that prohibit or restrict the use of wild-caught animals in labs.

Six Mauritian companies export macaques. The largest may be Noveprim, founded in 1980. "Monkeys are not indigenous to Mauritius," emphasized Noveprim chief executive Gerald de Senneville in an October 2007 interview by Nasseem Ackbarally of the Inter Press Service, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ackbarally found quick agreement from Mauritian Wildlife Foundation executive director Jacques Julienne and conservation manager Vikash Tattayah.

"The monkeys are a nuisance from a conservation point of view," said Julienne. "They eat birds' eggs, kill small and adult birds alike, and attack indigenous plants."

Added Tattayah, "Endangered species like the pink pigeon, the echo parakeet and even the Mauritian kestrel are regular monkey victims. Their impact on our forests is disastrous."

The Mauritian Nat-ional Parks & Conservation Fund collects an export tax of $70 per monkey.

The conservation argument, if globally persuasive, could buy Mauritius and other island nations that export non-native monkeys a political edge in competition with nations that sell native monkey species to labs.

The conservation argument joins the older argument for macaque export as pest control, voiced to Ackbarally by Mauritius Agricultural Marketing Cooperat-ive Federation chief Tunaz Rampall. Macaques "eat around 20% of our production, thieves take 10% and 15% are destroyed by insects and vermin," Rampall said.

But both the conservation and pest control arguments are undercut by the modus operandi of the monkey exporters.

"Breeding monkeys are captured between September and December, when food is rare in the wild," wrote Ackbarally. "The captured animals are checked for diseases such as tuberculosis. If found fit for breeding, they are kept in quarantine. Eight to twelve months later, they give birth. Two years later, the small monkeys are quarantined, checked for diseases and then exported."

The captures leave more food for the macaques who escape capture, who then are able to birth and raise more young the next year. Rather than lastingly reducing the population, the captures amount to "sustainable yield" cropping.

Mauritius exports about 10,000 monkeys from the island to the U.S., Britain, and Japan, generating foreign exchange revenue of more than $20 million a year, Mauritian agro-industry minister Arvin Boolell told Ackbarally.

His report came as protest rose in Malaysia over the June 2007 declaration of national resources and environment minister Seri Azmi Khalid that his office had relaxed a 23-year-old ban on exporting long-tailed macaques, specifically to supply laboratories and Chinese live markets. Khalid claimed that the macaques to be exported would be captured from the urban population of about 258,000, rather than the wild population of about 484,000.

"These poor primates will be destined for the cooking pot and be subjected to horrendous suffering in laboratories," objected vice chair M. Kula Segaran of the opposition Democratic Action Party, in a statement to Agence France-Presse.

"Segaran said that Azmi should make clear who would profit financially from the export of macaques, and say whether it had considered sterilization or humane culling" to reduce the macaque population, AFP reported.

The Malaysian Animal Rights & Welfare Society on October 19, 2007 asked the national Anti-Corruption Agency to investigate Khalid and former Department of Wildlife & National Parks director general Musa Nordin.

"In July, the Animal Rights & Welfare Society submitted a memorandum to Khalid demanding the reinstatement of the ban and a halt on all pending macaque shipments," reported Bede Hong of the online political news web site Malaysiakini. "They also lodged a police report against Azmi and ministry officials for [allegedly] violating the 1972 Protection of Wildlife Act. The police forwarded the case to the ACA last month, saying it has elements of abuse of power."

Musa Nordin admitted to the Malaysia Star in September 2007 that he is "indirectly involved" in the monkey traffic.

"We have information that the decision to export the monkeys was made when Musa Nordin was still the director general [of Wildlife & National Parks]," alleged Animal Rights & Welfare Society chair N. Surendran. "We have information that there is a connection with the company. He has close contacts with the Department of Wildlife. Clearly there was some hanky panky going on there with elements of corruption," Surendran told Malaysiakini.

Circumstantial evidence suggests that many of the wild-caught macaques who are supposedly sold to China to be eaten are instead becoming breeders or being sold to labs as allegedly captive bred.

Of note are that relatively few monkeys are seen in live markets, as the Chinese government has moved since the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreaks of 2002-2003 to suppress commerce in wild-caught mammals, while some laboratory monkey exporting companies have grown much more rapidly than the birth rates of their monkey troupes appear to account for.

An instance of suspect trafficking was intercepted in northern Vietnam on September 17, 2007. Police in Quang Ninh province confiscated 91 longtailed macaques from a truck heading toward the Chinese border, police spokesperson Cao Manh Hai told Associated Press.

"Sixteen of the animals were dead and the rest were very weak when the police found them," Associated Press reported.

Cao Manh Hai said the surviving macaques were being looked after at a local conservation center.