Tuesday August 18, 2009
Widespread killing of primates in Sarawak
By STEPHEN THEN
MIRI: Native folks and some city dwellers are slaughtering primates – in some cases mother and baby – to have them as exotic meat which is said to ‘‘very tasty”.
These practices are widespread and despite repeated complaints and reports to the State Wildlife Department and State Forestry Department, it seems to be getting worse.
In northern Sarawak, the killing of primates has become a “normal” practice in rural longhouses.
A senior reporter for Sin Chew Daily’s Miri office, Vincent Lo Kiun Shin, recently witnessed the horror of a mother gibbon and her baby being slaughtered for food by longhouse folks in Ulu Baram.
Slaughtered: The severed hand of a gibbon found in a longhouse in Ulu Baram in northern Sarawak. Expressing disgust with what he saw, he said: “These longhouse folks are supposed to value the forests they live in and protect its resources but they seem to be killing these wildlife blatantly without any mercy.
He said the animals were shot with guns and blowpipes and slaughtered.
“These animals are already in danger of extinction. Loggers are killing them and chasing them out of the forest.
“Now, they are being hunted and killed by the natives. Unless this sort of killing is stop- ped, soon there will be no more primates left in the forests,” he said yesterday.
Even here, monkeys and macaques are also being openly sold in the native markets and backlanes.
When The Star reported a case of a native trader selling a monkey in a small cage near the city bus station to a Miri Wildlife Department investigating officer, his response was: “I am off today. I will tell my boss about it.”
The next day, when asked what had happened to the case and why no enforcement officers showed up at the scene, this investigating officer replied: “I don’t know”.
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