NEWS
ACRES IN THE NEWS
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The Straits Times
20 May 2006
Hope for a new life – in India
By Sonia Tan
A female rhesus monkey was yesterday flown to a wildlife reservation in India to begin a new life after nearly two years at the Singapore Zoo, and most of her life before that as an illegally kept pet.
The primate, named Asha – an Indian name meaning Hope – will find a home at the Wildlife SOS Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre in New Delhi, which has a resident troop of rhesus monkeys.
Asha is the second primate to be repatriated by local animal welfare charity Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Acres). The first was a vervet monkey, which was sent to Africa in 2004.
For the past 20 months Asha was living at the zoo. She had been put on a proper diet of leaves, monkey pellets and fruits to help her lose weight.
Overweight and sluggish when rescued, she is now healthier and livelier, but the zoo cannot keep her because it does not have rhesus monkeys in its primate collection. She would have been without a companion.
Before life at the zoo, she spent several years living with a chain around her neck and crammed into a small cage in a corner of a warehouse in Malan Road, off Alexandra Road – a product of the illegal animal trade.
While not all animals in the trade end up as pets here, Singapore has been and still is “a major transit hub” for trade in illegal wildlife because of its strategic location, said Mr Louis Ng, the president of Acres. Animals that end up as pets, like Asha, are often malnourished and neglected.
Dr Oh Soon Hock, the zoo veterinarian who took care of Asha recalled: “When we found her, she looked quite horrible. She was fed only bananas and rice and other human foods, so at the beginning, she was fat. She'd sit in one corner and not move much.”
Those caught smuggling illegal wildlife can be fined up to $50,000 and jailed for up to two years per animal under the newly toughened up laws against illegal wildlife trade.
s Amy Corrigan, Acres' director of zoology, said of Asha's departure yesterday: “At last, she will have a permanent home in a sanctuary and be reunited with her own kind. In short, her name will be fulfilled.”
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