New campaign: Never have your photograph taken with wild animals on the streets!

The autumn has arrived once again which means that we will slowly start packing up our stuff and move our head quarters to warmer latitudes! During the past season we have obtained great results from the movement patterns of turtles by tracking Urho, Hilja and Hertta and we will continue to gather more data this incoming season. This year we will be attaching at least two more satellites to new green turtles around Christmas.

As a new thing, we are starting a campaign against wild animals on the streets. Wild animals, such as primates, elephants and exotic lizards are a common sight on the busy streets of Thailand. They are used as livelihood by locals who let the animals pose with tourists in photographs and then sell the photos. This is a sad praxis since many of the animals are highly endangered. For instance, the white-handed gibbon which is one of the most common “street animals” in Thailand is found on the IUCN red list of endangered species. Gibbon babies are acquired when their parents are shot, after which they are illegally sold. It is not uncommon that they end up in bars and sometimes even forced to drink alcoholic drinks and smoke cigarettes. The animals are kept calm in the streets by sedatives. However, when gibbons reach sexual maturity at 6-7 years, they often become too aggressive to handle, which then leads to their killing or dumping.

Turtle Watch org is starting a new campaign against wild animal photographing in Thailand in December 2010. The idea behind the campaign is to raise the awareness of tourists about the illegal
animal trade underlying the street animals business. This will be done through substantial communication with the European traveling agencies and networks operating in the area, including education of the destination guides. The travel agencies could also, for example, include a notice about the street animals in their trip advisors or destination guides. We will also hand out printed material, such as posters, to the traveling agencies.

A sedated gibbon at the busy bar street of Koh Samui. Animals belong in the jungle - not the streets!

Remeber to keep yourself posted about what's going in our project by following our blog and our FB-pages. And please support us by adopting a turtle, either for yourself or to a friend :)