AWF NEWS
An infant chimpanzee named Bouamir is in safe and nurturing hands now that AWF helped rescue her from wildlife traffickers. Named for an iconic rock formation in the 5,260-square kilometre Dja Faunal Reserve in southern Cameroon, the 10-month-old chimp was recovered last June. She had been tied up and left all alone in an empty house in a village outside the reserve. Her rescuers and area children named her after the rock outcropping as a symbol of her resilience. Poachers capture infants like Bouamir for the live animal trade. Many of the young chimps who survive the trauma of seeing their families slaughtered and then are smuggled to a new place will spend their lives in cages as entertainment animals. In these substandard roadside zoos and other such attractions, they suffer from malnutrition, isolation, and deplorable living conditions.
Still other chimps are illegally shipped overseas as status-symbol “pets.” These individuals virtually always come to a bad end, as adult chimpanzees have five to six times the strength of a human and natural drives that can lead them to behave destructively. Many so-called pet chimps, embraced as family members when young and cute, wind up shunned by their human families and put in cages and shock collars when they become too big and strong to manage.