Endangered gibbons of Thailand
They are the golden voice of the rainforest.Early in the morning, as the sunlight shafts through the treetops and the sparkling dew settles, the operatic performance of the white-handed gibbon begins. The male starts off with an aria of sombre notes, taken up by the female in a high-pitched crystal cry that no human diva could ever match.
Together, the gibbon pair makes beautiful music. Their magnificent call resonates across the forest canopy for a kilometre or more to say: “This is our home. Leave us be.”
Unfortunately the call of the gibbon has been ignored by mankind.
Today, all nine species of gibbons worldwide are either endangered or threatened. Some sub species of gibbons are almost extinct.
Destruction of their rainforest habitat by agricultural clearing or logging is the main problem. Poaching is the other, with hunters killing gibbons for meat or medicine, and for their young, which are sold as pets or performing animals.
“Often when people see gibbons chained as pets in homes or in bars, they don’t realise what has happened for the gibbon to get there in the first place,” said Patrick Cullen, a West Australian biologist who has been working to save these endangered apes in Thailand.
“They just think you have cats in Australia, we have gibbons over here,” he said.
Unfortunately the reality is less benign. To capture a baby gibbon, you must shoot the mother. The dead mother and the live baby then fall more than 50 metres to the ground before the baby is wrenched screaming from its parent. Very often the baby dies in the crush anyway.
Scientists estimate that for every baby gibbon seen alive outside the wild, two other baby gibbons and three mothers have died. More die in youth and perhaps one in ten make it to adulthood.
It is illegal to poach gibbons or keep them as pets in Thailand but the trade has continued, said Mr Cullen. This legislation by itself is ineffective without conservation measures which involve conservation education, community participation and the rescue, rehabilitation and release of captive gibbons.
This is where the Gibbon Rehabilitation Project (GRP) comes in. The GRP is part of the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand, which received an education grant from AUSaid, (the Australian Agency for International Development) and funding for Mr Cullen from the Overseas Service Bureau through its Australian Volunteers Abroad program.
Mr Cullen was project manager of the GRP for two years and has now returned to WA to complete his Masters research programme at Murdoch University. Under the supervision of Professor Ralph Swan at Murdoch’s veterinary school (who also is overseeing another rehabilitation project on orangutans), Mr Cullen is writing up the data and experience accumulated by the GRP since 1992.The GRP rescues gibbons, in many cases from restaurants and bars where they are dressed up, dragged around for photos and prodded by drunken patrons. They are often drugged to keep them awake during the bar’s late night hours and subsist on an unsuitable diet of peanuts and beer.
This continues till the gibbons are about six years old, when they mature and become aggressive animals, and are then dumped.
The GRP often has to nurse them back to health and then gradually resocialise them with their own kind. Naturalistic gibbon behaviours emerge and the animals are then released onto islands in national parks for habituation into forest life. The final goal is to reintroduce gibbons into areas where they have become extinct.
But it is not as simple as it sounds. It has been very much a trial-and-error process since the GRP’s establishment in 1992. The program is only now starting to make progress, with an above 50 per cent success rate in its rehabilitation of gibbons on some islands.
Mr Cullen also stressed that these efforts were nullified if there was no conservation awareness in the local community. So the GRP also has an educational arm which tries to get the local community on side.
While illegal logging was a big problem, farmers and poachers were not all greedy individuals, said Mr Cullen. As populations grew, people had no choice but to exploit the forests to try an eke out a living.
An alternative was to make the gibbons more useful alive rather than dead. For example, to create tourism or other employment opportunities which helped impoverished villages.
“Local conservation projects need to benefit the local community as well,” said Mr Cullen. “In the end, environmental protection needs to go hand in hand with social development.”
Till that happens however, the temptation to poach and sell baby gibbons is great, considering that one sells on the black market for about the equivalent of a month’s wages (6000 baht or $A300).
The gibbons are prized as pets because they display human characteristics and appear to make good companions.
They could be described as the most ‘politically correct’ of all the apes, explained Mr Cullen. The male and female pair are co-dominant in long term relationships and share responsibility for raising the family. They often live as a nuclear or blended families with up to five offspring. Young gibbons live with their parents for up to ten years, and when young form intense attachments with their mother.
In the absence of their own gibbon mother, a baby gibbon may form a strong bond with its human owner. It will need to wear nappies, be nursed and carried around constantly, just like a human baby. As it grows older, its intelligence, playfulness and acrobatic displays will endear it to its human captors even more.
“But make no mistake,” warned Mr Cullen, “it is a one way relationship”.
Hormones kick in at adolescence, and the cute cuddly animals transform into unpredictable wild animals with 4cm fangs. That is when the pet novelty wears off.
“They are cute and cuddly and it’s hard not to develop a relationship with them but keeping them is not right,” said Mr Cullen. “In the end they are wild animals and they belong in the wild.”
“No matter how much you like them, you really don’t want to see them in a cage.”
Mr Cullen hopes to secure enough funding to continue his research into the rehabilitation of gibbons in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia and in the process, further the work of the GRP.
“The greatest feeling for me is to see these beautiful creatures out in the wild where they belong - and listen to their clear majestic voice ringing out over the forest tops.”
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