PHUKET: A loris rescue centre is on the way for Phuket to save the cute creatures still being abused each night on Bangla.
It's Loris Awareness Week so the organisers seeking to set up the centre are asking cash donations from people who want the touting of the animals on Patong's best-known tourist street stopped.
Primatologist Petra Osterberg, a long term returning volunteer at the Phuket Gibbon Project rehabilitation centre, says: ''I am now collaborating with the Thai registered Love Wildlife Foundation on the set up of a slow loris rescue project.
''We are having promising negotiations with the Thai Department of National Parks and are now at the stage where we need to secure some funding.''
An online fundraising campaign will raise some much needed money to get properly started, she says.
A Phuket centre has been rescuing and rehabilitating gibbons for 20 years now and during the past 10 years has successfully managed to re-establish a small wild breeding population of gibbons in Khao Phraw Thaew forest - the last sizable rainforest on Phuket.
Returning the lorises to the wild could be much more difficult, and perhaps inapprorpiate. But they certainly need saving.
''Many of these lorises may be non-native to Phuket or to the south of Thailand. Lorises are specialist feeders and they have large territories in the wild which they may fight until death to defend.
''It is often unethical to release captive lorises back to the wild as the likelihood of them dying after release is over 90 percent.
''Your contribution can help us get slow lorises off the tourist streets of Phuket where they are being exploited for holiday snap-shots and it can help us educate more tourists about the devasting illegal animal trade,'' says the donations page at
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/slow-loris-rescue-project
It's Loris Awareness Week so the organisers seeking to set up the centre are asking cash donations from people who want the touting of the animals on Patong's best-known tourist street stopped.
Primatologist Petra Osterberg, a long term returning volunteer at the Phuket Gibbon Project rehabilitation centre, says: ''I am now collaborating with the Thai registered Love Wildlife Foundation on the set up of a slow loris rescue project.
''We are having promising negotiations with the Thai Department of National Parks and are now at the stage where we need to secure some funding.''
An online fundraising campaign will raise some much needed money to get properly started, she says.
A Phuket centre has been rescuing and rehabilitating gibbons for 20 years now and during the past 10 years has successfully managed to re-establish a small wild breeding population of gibbons in Khao Phraw Thaew forest - the last sizable rainforest on Phuket.
Returning the lorises to the wild could be much more difficult, and perhaps inapprorpiate. But they certainly need saving.
''Many of these lorises may be non-native to Phuket or to the south of Thailand. Lorises are specialist feeders and they have large territories in the wild which they may fight until death to defend.
''It is often unethical to release captive lorises back to the wild as the likelihood of them dying after release is over 90 percent.
''Your contribution can help us get slow lorises off the tourist streets of Phuket where they are being exploited for holiday snap-shots and it can help us educate more tourists about the devasting illegal animal trade,'' says the donations page at
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/slow-loris-rescue-project
Hi Ms Osterberg, what are your plans if they cannot be released locally into the wild. Can they be transported to the most likely areas they can survive in other parts of Thailand?
Posted by Fiesty Farang on September 20, 2013 14:41