Monkey strong together1/27/2024 Liz recently published her book, Licensing Laws and Animal Welfare: The Legal Protection of Wild Animals, with Palgrave MacMillan/Springer Nature. In 2018, she earned her doctorate in Animal Welfare Law. ![]() She helped to establish the very first locally-run sterilisation program for street dogs in the Middle East worked with indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon to end the hunting of wild primates ran a UK charity campaigning to end the exploitation of animals in circuses and zoos and helped design a new rehabilitation complex for rescued monkeys at Born Free’s sanctuary in Ethiopia, Ensessa Kotteh. Liz Tyson-Griffin is Born Free USA’s Programs Director. You can help efforts by signing the petition here. Maarten officials to collaborate with experts to come up with a better plan, which mitigates the nuisance caused by the monkeys without resorting to mass slaughter. Maarten has the opportunity to establish a humane and effective population control project, which can lead the way for other islands in the region to follow.īorn Free USA is calling upon members of the public to abandon the monkey cull and encourage St. Likely growing from a founder population of escaped or released former pet monkeys, their presence on the island is no fault of their own and they do not deserve to be killed.Īs a country that relies on tourism, killing innocent animals may lead to backlash and affect the local economy. Monkeys on the island territory may not be native, but they have co-existed alongside the human population for decades and perhaps even centuries. So, even with misleading information, the public survey can hardly be considered decisive. That being said, there was only a small majority of people who favoured killing over either doing nothing or sterilising the monkeys (55% and 45%, respectively). ![]() As such, it appears that survey respondents were not representative of the wider population and the majority of respondents were people most likely to be biased toward lethal control. Interestingly, 72% of survey respondents self-identified as involved in agriculture whereas more than 85% of island residents are employed in tourism and just 1% of the country’s GDP comes from agriculture. Indeed, as both methods require the trapping of monkeys, the risk of failure is arguably equal in both cases. Again, no evidence was provided to support this claim. It also cited that there was a “risk of failure” if sterilisation was chosen but not if killing was chosen to control the monkey population. The survey included the claim that sterilisation would cost five times more than culling, which is unsubstantiated. ![]() Indeed, some information provided to respondents, and upon which their responses were based, were incorrect. The Nature Foundation points to a public survey as a means to demonstrate public support for the monkey cull but results are misleading. With veterinarians standing by to offer training and expertise, there is no reason for sterilisation to be more expensive than the proposed monkey cull. Maarten government to provide a cost analysis and to allow the coalition to re-cost the project. The coalition in favor of sterilization has asked the St. The Nature Foundation report claims that monkeys’ sterilisation would cost five times more than what it would cost to kill them, however, there is no information available to substantiate this claim. This, they say, means that there is no urgent need to eradicate the monkeys and rather there is time to implement humane non-lethal control before numbers get out of hand. The coalition letter stated that this “shows a disturbing lack of understanding of primate behavior and reproduction.” Indeed, calculations carried out by Born Free USA based on population growth over time estimate that monkey numbers may grow by 10% per year, not 100% as claimed by the Nature Foundation. The Nature Foundation document claims that the estimated 450-strong population could double in size in the space of 12 months. Population Growth Figures Are Wildly InaccurateĪside from questions arising over the true number of monkeys on the island, with some primatologists working in the region casting doubt over the accuracy of the Nature Foundation’s census, the report’s claims over potential population growth were rejected. ![]() Breaking the issues down, the groups noted the following points. In the detailed letter sent to the government, the coalition raised concerns over the quality of the research upon which the decision to execute the monkey cull was based. To date, more than 2,500 compassionate people have signed it. On March 2, in a bid to increase pressure, a public petition was launched to show support for the proposed sterilisation programme. Maarten government on February 2, 2023, but received no response from officials.
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