A group of 27 endangered slow lorises have a much brighter future ahead of them after being rescued from illegal wildlife traffickers in West Java over the weekend.
Indonesian authorities teamed up with International Animal Rescue (IAR) to conduct two separate raids on the traders, who planned to send the endangered animals to buyers in other parts of Indonesia.
The first raid took place in Cirebon last Friday. Authorities rescued nineteen slow lorises and a 24-year-old suspected online trader was arrested.
The IAR medical team and a specialised team of animal keepers found the rescued animals to be dehydrated, with some suffering from eye infections. Fortunately, these lorises had their teeth intact, despite traders usually clipping their teeth while in captivity.
The slow lorises are currently being looked after at IAR’s rescue and rehabilitation centre in Ciapus, where they will remain until they receive full medical check-ups and can be released back into the wild.
The second rescue operation took place in Majalengka a day later and saw police arrest a hunter and online trader who was holding eight slow lorises.
Authorities arrived just in time, as the trader had just finished packing the animals into cramped plastic boxes to be sent to Yogyakarta.
Christine Rattel, programme advisor at IAR Indonesia, explained that this was a typical scene of wildlife trafficking.
“Traders load the lorises together in small, cramped crates after poaching them from the wild, and this causes them wounds, stress, and sometimes serious medical problems that may even result in death,” Rattel said in the IAR’s press release.
She said that 80% of lorises captured from the wild die before even making it to a buyer.
The illegal trade of slow lorises means they “might disappear within the next five years”, according to Achmad Pribadi from the Sub Directorate for the Protection and Security of Forests.
“Slow lorises have been recognised as threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and are included in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which is the most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species,” Pribadi said.
IAR Indonesia runs an awareness and outreach campaign in an effort to educate the public about the dangers of wildlife trafficking, but slow lorises and other wild animals continue to be snatched from the wild and sold.
The police and the IAF are urging the public to stop supporting traffickers by buying wild animals as pets.
Only then can the population of endangered animals be protected in the wild.
To learn more about IAF’s work in Indonesia and how you can help, check out https://www.internationalanimalrescue.org/
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