Refinery rescues and more

The three days that have passed since the last posting have not been without drama. Two rescues at the massive petroleum refinery, SAPREF, south of Durban, left us scratching our heads trying to figure out what it is that would lead Vervets to move from the relatively safe and pristine coastal dune forest adjacent to the refinery into the apparantly monkey unfriendly refinery with its noise, oily pollution, noxious fumes, razor wire, etc. We have already rescued an Egyptian goose, two Blue Duiker, and seven monkeys from the refinery. The goose, a duiker and a juvenile monkey had fallen into oil traps and been totally covered in the thick black gunge. All three were successfully cleaned and then released some time later. The pic on the left shows the juvenile Vervet before he was cleaned of every drop of oil.

This past week saw us carry out another two monkey rescues at SAPREF. The first, a young adult female, had been caught in perimeter razor wire and after what must have been a terrible struggle, ripped herslf free. Her hands, feet arms and body were so badly cut that she must have endured indescribable suffering before we caught her. Sadly her body could not combat the massive infection that had already set in and even with the dedicated and expert treatment of veterinarian Dr Kerry Easson she died during the first night in our “high care”. The second rescue had all the ingredients of a comedy-drama. A young, adult male Vervet, who had been severely injured by two other males the previous day, took refuge on top of a “tower”in the refinery. Whilst trying to assess the best way of capturing him we were unceremoniously evicted from the area because we had not been given “special clearance” to enter this particularly high risk area of the refinery. Forty-five minutes later, Carol and I, decked out in overalls, safety shoes, hard hat, special gloves, ear plugs and safety goggles were back on site to carry out the rescue, which we did successfully, but not before I was almost blinded and hosed off the tower by very helpful SAPREF employees using a water cannon to keep the monkey from running off the tower and escaping along the myriad pipes that seem to link every structure at the refinery. Thanks to Dr Easson (below left) this young male, now well stitched together and minus one testicle, will live to fight another day.

But there is light on the SAPREF horizon. We have met with their environmental officer who is arranging a meeting for the Monkey Helpline to assist and advise on how to make SAPREF less accessible to monkeys and also to find ways of keeping the monkeys within the adjacent natural areas as much as possible.

Sadly our “dead file” continues to grow. By end of day on June 16 we had added another 32 – yes, thirty-two – dead monkeys since June 1. That is two dead monkeys every day! And since June 17 we have added at least one dead monkey every day with yesterday, Sunday 21, having been a particularly grim day with three dead – one euthanased due to severe injuries sustained from being run over by a motor vehicle, one euthanased after being paralysed by a lead pellet from an airgun, and one euthanased after tetanus (lock-jaw) set in.

The next posting will include a piece about Coffee and Coco, two juvenile male Vervets who Carol is currently playing foster mother to.

Thursday, June 18, 2009-06-18

Help us to help the Vervets and other primates

The purpose of this blog is to highlight the plight of Vervet monkeys and other primates in KwaZulu-Natal and throughout South Africa and the rest of the world.

To do this we tell you about the work we do, how we do it and what we strive to achieve. To understand the enormity of the battle we face you have only to look at the number of Vervet rescues we do every day, and when you consider that it is only Carol and I and a small team of dedicated rescue supporters who are actively involved, you can imagine how many more Vervets need our help every day yet we don’t even know about them.

Even with our small team we could achieve so much more - rescue many more animals, and educate countless more people if all the people who care about primates and know about the work we do would do something to actively help and support us.

So how can you help?

More than anything else the monkeys need friends, people who respect them and care for them and who are prepared to take a hand in helping them survive in this increasingly monkey-unfriendly world.

There are many ways you can help - becoming a rescuer or rescue assistant, helping educate people about monkeys by handing out information leaflets or doing or arranging talks about monkeys to schools and other groups, helping out at our information tables such as the one at Essenwood Market every Saturday, becoming a troop monitor, helping with building monkey enclosures, or working at our high care clinic. All this and much more -

Such as becoming a Monkey Helpline VIP (Vervet Interested Person) supporter and recruiting more VIP supporters, becoming a Sponsor, Donor or doing fundraising.

Make a donation.

Without sufficient funds we can’t operate. The fuel for our vehicle, the cell phone communication, veterinary costs, food for the monkeys in our high care and the many other costs associated with the successful running of this project are entirely dependent on public donations, supporter membership fees and sponsorships!

For more about “how you can help”, contact the Monkey Helpline:

Steve on 082 659 4711 or Carol on 082 411 5444 or email steve@animalrightsafrica.org .

Banking Details for deposits into the Monkey Helpline account:

- Account name: Monkey Helpline
- Bank : Standard Bank
- Branch : Melville
- Account number: 081385439
- Branch code : 006105
- Type of account: Cheque
- Swift code: SBZAZAJJ

- Reference: Your organization, cell/mobile phone number or email

January to June 2009

Its been a while since this blog was updated, but new information will be posted every day if possible and at the very least every week from here on.

It has been a hectic year so far for the Monkey Helpline with rescue callouts every day – and we still average three rescues every two days, with six rescues on each of the past two Saturdays.

Currently we have 27 monkeys in our “high care!

This year to date we have also done in excess of forty educational talks about Vervet monkeys to schools and other community groups, manned our outreach table at the Essenwood Craft Market every Saturday and promoted the work of Monkey Helpline and Animal Rights Africa in many other public forums. We continue to distribute thousands of information leaflets.

Looking at the statistics of Vervet monkeys dealt with by the Monkey Helpline so far this year, it is shocking to know how many of these monkeys actually died.

In the period 1 January 2009 to 17 May 2009, 137 days, we dealt with 143 dead monkeys – just more than one dead monkey every day! These monkeys were euthanased, died en route to the vet, died during or after veterinary treatment, or in some cases were already dead on our arrival.

67 deaths were the result of motor vehicle accidents.

29 deaths were the result of pellet gun injuries

22 deaths were the result of injuries caused by dogs

12 deaths were the result of injuries caused by other monkeys

13 deaths were due to poisoning, razor-wire, electrocution, raptors, Tetanus or snares. One was burnt with hot oil.

These figures do not reflect those monkeys dealt with by any other primate handling groups in KZN.

X-rays show that over eighty percent of the monkeys rescued or retrieved by the Monkey Helpline have air gun pellets lodged in their bodies, rarely only one pellet, mostly between two and eight pellets, some with ten to fifteen pellets.

If one considers that the Monkey Helpline is only dealing with the tip of the ice-berg when it comes to rescuing or retrieving sick, injured, orphaned or otherwise in-need-of-help Vervets in KZN, the rate at which the Vervet population in KZN, particularly in and around towns and cities, is being decimated should set alarm bells ringing. It certainly makes a mockery of those claims that there is a population explosion of Vervets and that they are breeding out of control. Now more than ever they need our protection and care, especially when you consider that our “dead file” has 29 new entries just for the first 15 days of June!

(PS. The figure of 143 dead monkeys in the first 137 days of 2009 was subsequently adjusted to 154 after some misfiled admission records were re-filed)

September 14 and 15

Sept 14 is another day of diversity which includes setting our trap in Belamont Gardens, Umhloti, for a young monkey (about the age of the monkey Carol is holding in this pic) with an exposed skull. We need to catch him or else the exposed bone will dry out and allow germs direct access to the brain – which will be fatal! Garth and Mandy who live in Belamont Gardens are very famiiar with this injured monkey and his troop. They will attempt the trapping.

Most of the day is taken up with non-monkey related rescues for the Animal Rights Africa project, Animal Rescues Unimited (ARU), also coordinated by Steve and Carol.

Sept 15 starts with a 6.30 rescue callout to Escombe in Queensburgh. An early morning walker has literally had a small monkey drop out of a tree onto the road in front of him after the thin branch it was clinging to, broke. He calls a friend, Santi, who happens to have our ARU project number after a cat rescue we did for her about two years ago. Santi describes the monkey’s condition to me, which doesn’t sound at all good, and I ask her to go and fetch it right away and keep it wrapped warmly till I get there. From her description of the monkey, I imagine it to be one of last season's youngsters, about ten months old.

What an unexpected surprise when I arrive at the scene. Santi has placed the wrapped monkey in a spare room so that it cannot escape if it suddenly finds a burst of energy. But this monkey is going nowhere! He is a one-day old newborn, virtually frozen stiff and instinctively still clinging tightly to the piece of dried branch that he must have clung to all night after being separated from his mother the previous day. His sparse hair was no protection against the cold and how he was still alive after the cold night is anyone’s guess.

The best I can do for him is stick him under my t-shirt and hope my body warmth will help him. He is in desperate need of warming up quickly so I also turn up the cars heater to maximum and have to drive home feeling like I am in a sauna. A quick call to Carol has her waiting at the gate with the necessary warm-up goodies – covered hot water bottle and soft baby blanket. She does the necessary mothering whilst I call Jan and James Hampton, our surrogate parents of choice when it comes to caring for the newborn babies we rescue every year, and break the news to them that their first baby for the 2008/9 season is about to be delivered to them. They have successfully cared for scores of baby monkeys over many years and fortunately we will be seeing them in a few hours at a primate rehabilitation workshop we will all be attending.

By the time we hand over the baby to Jan, he has a full tummy and is already much stronger, and by the end of the workshop, during which he has been constantly mothered and bottle-fed by Jan, he has a healthy look about him. Baby Jordan, as Jan has named him after Carol’s son, is now in very good hands and we feel confident that he will survive.

During the day we receive a call from Dianne in Northdene, Queensburgh who tells us that one of the pregnant females in “her” troop has got a snare tightly encircling her chest just below her breasts. This is a dire predicament for this monkey to be in, especially as she will soon be nursing a baby. We have to trap her as soon as possible in order to remove the snare, hopefully before she gives birth! But by the time Dianne has gone back to see if she is still there, the troop has moved on. Dianne will phone the moment she sees the snared monkey again, hopefully very soon!

September 13

Like every Saturday, this one starts with our outreach/education table at the Essenwood Market in Durban. And like every other Saturday at the Market, a rescue callout interrupts our enthusiastic engagement with people wanting to know more about the work we do with monkeys, or want advice on how to keep monkeys out of their home and garden, or people who just want to tell us how much they despise monkeys - fortunately not many of this last lot.

This time the call is from St. Winifreds in Amanzimtoti south of Durban. Carol stays at the market and I attend to the callout. The monkey is an adult male with a badly injured left arm. He has been sprawled on a branch all morning with the injured arm just hanging down. When he gets uncomfortable and changes position, the arm is not used at all. From what I can see he has a bad cut under the left upper arm into the shoulder joint. There is a lot of blood but the wound has stopped bleeding. He shows no interest in the food offered to entice him within catching range and the only way we will possibly catch him is by darting him with a sedative. Friend Daniel from the Pietermaritzburg SPCA arrives and attempts a darting. But the wind is howling and the shot is not a good one. The dart does however hit the monkey and galvanizes him into action. He jumps from the tree onto a roof and from there to the ground and races away. Daniel and I, nets in hand, race after him in the hope that enough of the sedative has been released into his muscle to at least slow him down after a couple of minutes. No such luck! A hundred meters further and he has disappeared. We search in vain and eventually admit that we have lost him. We can only hope that he has made it into the nearby bush and that if the drug does take affect he will sleep it off in the safety of the impenetrable vegetation.

We ask a few locals who are sympathetic to the monkeys to keep a look out for him and notify us if they see him.

Back to the Market just in time to help Carol with packing up.

As we leave the Market we receive another rescue callout. This time it is a young monkey at a home in Shallcross, barely able to drag himself along. Carol tells the caller to secure the monkey by placing a laundry basket over him and holding it down until we arrive. Far too often callers have assured us that the animal cannot move and is virtually dead, only for us to arrive at the scene to find the animal disappeared, because they did not keep watch over it as requested by us.

But this little chap really wasn’t going anywhere. The victim of a high voltage powerline electrocution, both his legs and one hand are burnt beyond repair. His injuries are horrific, yet so strong is the will to survive that he has crawled from who knows where as he attempts to follow his troop. How he managed to avoid dogs and cars we'll never know. With heavy hearts we rush him to the Sherwood Emergency Veterinary Clinic where compassionate staff gently ease his suffering with a strong sedative and then euthanase him.

A sad end to a long day!

September 12

Mid-morning and there is a call from Ann on the Bluff to tell us that after hearing the sound of an airgun, she rushed downstairs from her second floor flat to find a beautiful adult male Vervet lying dead just inside the boundary wall. We asked her to put the monkey in a bag until we can get there to assess the situation. Arriving at the scene we collect the body of the monkey from the gardener and on inspection we see that it has a very clearly identifiable pellet hole in the right side of the head, just in front of the ear, and that this is definitely the cause of death. Ann tells us the neighbour, an old man in his eighties, regularly hides amongst his banana trees and shoots at the monkeys and birds who visit his extensive, back-yard fruit and vegetable garden.

So off we went to visit the old man. After depositing the monkey on the dining room table I asked “Oom Johan”, as a middle-aged woman also living there called him, if he had shot any monkeys in the past hour or so. He was horrified that I should suspect him of having shot the monkey. He did however admit that he had, in the past hour or so, fired a pellet in the direction of the troop of monkeys that had been in his garden eating his bananas. But, he said, he had aimed at the wall behind the monkeys and that having served his country for five years during the Second World War there was no way that he would have shot a monkey if he had aimed at the wall! The connection here eludes me. Is there one?

Half an hour later we were no closer to convincing Oom Johan that his aim was not nearly as true as he liked to believe, and that the monkey lying dead on his dining room table had actually been killed by him.

We took the dead monkey to one of our vets for it to be X-rayed and to obtain a vet report confirming the cause of death. We intend pursuing a criminal prosecution of Oom Johan in terms of the relevant section of the Firearms Control Act which makes it a criminal offence to fire an air/pellet gun in a residential area, as well as in terms of the Animal Protection Act. There definitely was cruelty involved, as the monkey had lived long enough after being shot in the head to run approximately fifteen to twenty meters and clamber over a 1.8 meter high wall before dying.

It is a source of constant frustration to us that the callous individuals who shoot monkeys and also harm and kill them in other ways, do so with virtual impunity because the people who see them do so and report such incidents to us, are reluctant to go to a police station to make a statement under oath, partly out of fear and partly because the police are indifferent to their complaint and even refuse to take a statement from them. Without such a statement our hands are tied and monkeys will continue to suffer and die like this.

So, if you are aware of anyone shooting monkeys with a pellet gun, go to your local police station and insist that they take your statement under oath. Then contact the Monkey Helpline and we will advise you on further steps that must be taken to help us stop this ruthless maiming and killing of monkeys.

September 11

September 11 - A quiet day insofar rescues went – none! But the day was still busy as we cleaned cages and then checked and fed the monkeys in the High Care Facility, fielded the usual calls about the “monkey menace”, contacted some of our monkey troop monitors to discuss their observations, AND attended to the needs of three children and the host of resident and “just passing through” animals who constitute an integral part of the lives of all animal rescuers and rehabilitators. And no day is complete without a visit from our resident Vervet troop (see attached pic) which, with approximately 35 members, forms an important resource in our ongoing efforts to understand the manner in which Vervet troops are structured and how they function as a team yet display such individualistic character traits. We are reminded daily, as we observe them, that there is still a mass of knowledge to be acquired before anyone can claim to really “know” these amazingly complex and intelligent little primates.