Experiences at an animal refuge.

The last few months I´ve been very busy in helping to run Merazonia, which is sometimes both rewarding and frustrating at the same moment. Because it seems nowadays so popular to start an animal refuge in Ecuador, or to become volunteer coordinator at one of them, I would like to start this e-mail with some of the downsides of trying to run an animal refuge as good as possible in a country like Ecuador.

To start with the worst, don’t expect that your work and effort will really be appreciated by the Ecuadorian government or local governmental environmental organizations. The local organizations you can’t even really blame for this, because the either don’t have enough knowledge or ‘tools’ (money) to do their job properly, even if they want to.

As a result of this you have to put a lot of time effort and money (to pick up confiscated animals) in trying to keep a good relationship with them. If you don´t do this you have a big change that they forget about your refuge.

For example, about a month ago we established a very good contact with a police and environmental road-control station in Mera. In two weeks time they send us a baby squirrel monkey, a blue head parakeet, a rainbow boa and two very small parrots. O, well, they didn’t really send them to us, but they contacted us directly, so we could pick up these animals and arrange the necessary documents for them. This way we only had to pay 6 US$ for a taxi (instead of 20)and it saved the animals extra time in their carton boxes and transport time (stress) to be transported back and forward to Puyo.

A few days later, after a short medical checkup the rainbow boa could already be released back in nature. The squirrel monkey went to another centre that already has 3 baby squirrel monkeys and the birds will get a good live in Merazonia.

Because the people of the environmental police at the control station change every two weeks, I went there two weeks ago to try to establish a good contact with the new people. However, they told me that they were not allowed to send us animals anymore? Orders from the director in Puyo, they have to send all confiscated animals to Puyo again.

I went to see the director of the environmental police in Puyo and asked him why? He told me that the people at the control are not well enough educated and informed about the refuges in the neighborhood to make proper decisions of where to send confiscated animals to. A reasonable argument I would say. However, I think that the director himself is only one of the few in this office who does have this knowledge and I wonder if he has time to deal with all the animals that come in? He is director now from September last year, but never visited Merazonia, because he is been to busy. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but of all the real animal refuges in the province of Pastaza and surrounding Merazonia is at the moment by far the best (Amazoonico is far more experienced, but in Tena), partly because Merazonia is the only one with a vet, clinic and reasonable quarantine procedure. What surprises and worries me is that we received 5 animals in only two weeks from the road control in Mera and after the change of staff we haven’t received any animal anymore. Did the smuggle stop, are the new control people less good at their job in confiscating illegal animals, or where are the animals now going???

Other problems that are a direct result of the lack of knowledge and/or money at the environmental departments is that shitty animal refuges, zoo´s and other places that keep animals in bad enclosures and with an insufficient treatment, easily get away with it.

A reproduction centre for small mammals has a jaguar and an ocelot without permission in bad enclosures. But instead of taking away the animals, the environmental department of Puyo just gave the centre another license. The enclosures didn´t change, but since it is now a zoo now, they are suddenly allowed to keep more different species…

We know of a bad animal refuge/zoo which is close to the office of the environmental police office in Puyo. They receive animals without the proper documents and it is well known that the owner sometimes even buys animals to show to tourists. The animals are also not well taken care off and most cages are bad. They use volunteer coordinators with a good heart, but not enough knowledge to run the place, until they start to know too much and really want to change the place and then they leave or have to leave… These things are known, but still the place keeps existing and even continues receiving more animals?!

Another example are the animals of former Flor de la Amazonia. During a last inspection of the environmental police they saw that there was food in the food-trays of the animals, which was reason enough for them to say that the animals are well taken care off…

In Santa Martha in Tambillo, at 3000m altitude, they keep a baby woolly monkey without the proper treatment to prepare it for a live back in the jungle. Why don’t they send it to a place in the jungle where it can learn to climb in trees? Maybe it still has a possibility to be (semi) released in the jungle around Amazonionico in an already excising ‘free’ group of woolly monkeys? This is the goal for Samson, the cute woolly monkey we take care of in Merazonia. Samson started 5 months ago with being carried around in a blanket wrapped around the waste of a volunteer and playing on the ground. Now however he has explored most of the trees around the area of Merazonia and hopefully he is soon ready to be introduced to the woolly monkeys in Amazoonico.

Currently we also take care of a baby capuchin monkey. She (Sleven) got confiscated during carnival at a rock-concert in Puyo. It was estimated that she was only about two and a half weeks old and that she would have died soon if she hadn´t been directly send over to Merazonia. The police wanted to keep her in the office until after the weekend to see what to do with her, luckily some former Flor the la Amazonia members convinced them to send the monkey directly to us. She still needs a 24h day-care with ‘a mother’ milk and warm water bottles. It is a tiring, but rewarding job, looking at the progress she made in the last weeks J

Yes, it is a rewarding job to see these young monkeys grow up and starting to behave from demanding baby´s to real, more independent monkeys. But these rewarding only come from the monkeys themselves. It would be nice if sometimes the environmental police could show some interest, to come and visit to see what progress we make and how we treat their Ecuadorian animals. It could be that they don´t have time to visit us, but then they shouldn’t criticize the animal refuges in general (something they do) without closing the bad ones and visiting the good ones. Last year they told us that we should take Santa Martha as an example, because they have years of experience. But I wonder if they even know how well Merazonia takes care of her animals? According to some volunteers who worked at both places, Merazonia already looks and works more professional than Santa Martha…

Hopefully in the future we can find a way to establish a mutual respect with the environmental police, to communicate well and really work together. Maybe we can find some money to donate them a small quarantine to be able to properly keep the confiscated animals next to their office? Maybe this will gain their confidence in us gringos. Maybe this shows them that we are really in it to try to help the animals and not to gain money, like many other places.

A new treat that Merazonia had to deal with in the last few months is the construction of some water tanks in the river (El Rio Tigre) next to us. In order to be able to do this they have to close a junction that splits the river over about a hundred meters in two parts. Closing this junction could mean that the island in the middle, which we use as a quarantine, can get floated when the river rises. Why they choose just this spot, where they have to walk more than 1.5 km with all the construction materials is a mystery? They could build it closer to the village and have an access road almost next to it. Maybe the land there is more expensive? We also wonder if the river is even big enough to make a project like this worth the investment. Maybe it will end up the same like the Teleferico, the cable car from Mera to the opposite of the Pastaza River. They spend 300.000 US$ on this project and when they almost finished, one of the towers fell down and the site of the tower in Mera turns out to be to weak to support the weight of the tower and steel cables…

Because the river and even the island are officially state property, there isn’t much we can do against the construction of these water tanks. That the noble goal of the project is to collect more clean water for the villages of Mera and Shell, is also a reason not to oppose anything against this project.

However when we found out that they want to use dynamite to blow up some big rocks in the river and have no permit for this, the situation changed. Digging a bit deeper we also found out that the whole project wasn’t even approved, because there hadn’t been an investigation on the environmental impact of this project. Now we had a dilemma. Should we, as a bunch of gringos (foreigners), oppose anything against the construction of a water cleaning station that is ordered by the local government of Mera, a project that could benefit hundreds of Ecuadorians? A decision I had to make, because Frank was away and they were already drilling the holes for the dynamite. Louisa and I decided to try to stop the use of dynamite until a there had been a proper investigation on the environmental impact. After all the sound will stress the animals and the flying pieces of rock could damage our cages, or even injure the animals inside. What also bothers us is that nobody seemed to care about doing these things legally. How can we say that we try to protect the animals and nature of Ecuador, if also we would just accept these illegal activities?

I wrote a denunciation against the illegal destruction of nature, but carefully avoiding to write anything against the construction of this water cleaning station.  Let’s hope they respond quickly.

Next day the workers just continued with drilling holes and because it was Saturday, all governmental offices were closed until Monday. 

 Luckily one of our three neighbors, one who has a trout farm and used to be not very positive towards Merazonia now helped out. Because he is not very politic in communicating, the construction workers told us more than they told him and we had to keep him informed. He is afraid that the construction work will have a bad effect on the natural clean water supply for his trout pools, so now he came up with the local police to stop the work until a proper investigation would be done. The local police confiscated the drill and the 20 construction workers left. Well, at least until the police had gone and they had lunch, because after that they just continued cutting trees at the location where the cleaning installation will be build…

The same weekend the trout farm guy (Don Luis) did some investigation himself and he found out that a part of the land that the government of Mera wanted to buy from our second neighbor, the one who caused most of the problems when he sold the land of Merazonia without the deeds, did not belong to him?! This explains why they waited so long with the access road that they had promised to build for transporting the construction materials. Now they were damaging our just improved walking trail up to Merazonia. Things even got stranger when, in the deed registers of Mera, Don Luis also found out that the official deeds of the land belong to the sister of Guido’s (who works for Merazonia) grandfather. So the government almost paid the wrong person and Merazonia has been paying unnecessary rent to keep the horse on a piece of land that belongs to Guido’s family.

Now wait before we get to enthusiastic about this good news, it is still Ecuador where everything can happen. This second neighbor still thinks that he has gained position because Guido’s family left. This shouldn’t be possible with the existence of official deeds, but you never know. I hope he looses this time, than there will finally be justice after all the problems he caused for Merazonia.

The construction work is delayed and more effort is been put in trying to inform us and hopefully trying to do the work legally. At least everyone now got the message that even in Ecuador you can’t just start destroying nature without consequences.

To be continued…

Besides the politics, also the daily management of an animal refuge can sometimes be both rewarding and frustrating. An obvious example is the taking care of good and bad volunteers, volunteers who come to help or volunteers who just come to have a good time in the jungle. It might surprise you that even cleaning your dishes after breakfast or lunch isn’t logic to everyone. Sometimes it is also difficult to explain exact what we expect from the volunteers. This is often not to blame on them, but on ourselves, except when they continue in not reading the information that we provide about the different (daily) jobs. Besides the information that we write down we continuously have to try to find ways to motivate the volunteers in doing their jobs well and still have a very good time. With some volunteers this goes almost automatically, others need a lot more attention, which we can’t always give L The difficulty with managing volunteers is that no-one has the same skills. In a company workers are also different, but at least they all have certain skills in common, or they wouldn’t work for this specific company.

Although it is not always easy to manage volunteers, I have to admit that it gives a big satisfaction when all the jobs are properly done and together with inexperienced volunteers, we build beautiful cages and cabins J

A lesser known disappointment comes if an animal that you raised and/or took very well care of suddenly dies or has to die, because if it´s injuries. This happened with Lucas/Gizmo, a Tamarin monkey and our first wild animal we started to take care of on the 25^th of January 2009. We tried to introduce him together with some of ‘our’ other Tamarin monkeys to a group of wild Tamarin monkeys that lives in the area of Merazonia. At first everything seemed to go alright, but after he needed an operation on his testicles he became a bit of an outsider and one day we found him badly attacked and almost death in his cage (we used it as an introduction cage). Treatment couldn´t save him anymore and he died in our hands L I had to leave a tear about that, because he was my favorite animal. He was doing so well from being used to eat candies and sitting on peoples heads, he had been living in the jungle with other Tamarin monkeys, finding and catching most of his own food. He kept visiting us, saying hallo and trying to ‘steal’ things, but most of the time he spend with his own species in the trees around Merazonia. We will never forget him.

The frustration that might come with the difficulties written above could also influence our mood and friendships. We all work and live 24/7 together, so it is not always easy to step away from arguments. To take some time for yourself, talk with others about your problems, or just to let them cool down until the next day. Knowing that I´m often very direct and sometimes hard in my opinion, it is sometimes challenging for me spare my friends and some ‘bad’ volunteers my hard judgment. I know I need to try to be more diplomatic and less stubborn about certain things, but I also always try to get the most out of things (people), so in this I still need to find a balance. Most important is that we as management trust each other and know that we can relay on each other when needed J

I promised to end this story positive and for this I want to describe just another day at Merazonia.

They said a lot of things, but mostly irrelevant. Like the question about how to build something without cutting trees? We are against the illegal activities and use of dynamite, not against the building project itself.

The Mayer found it necessary to say that we didn’t have to worry about the environmental impact. She would ask ‘their’ engineer to do an investigation about the environmental impact. They promised to inform us as good as possible and that they to wanted to try to damage the nature as less as possible. Although it is a bit late for these promises, since they had almost used the dynamite already a few days ago, I guess that for the moment this is the best we can expect.

After this meeting we worked further on the bridge (that had broken down before)

and a new cage, fed the animals again in the afternoon and at the end of the day I had to help Louisa to euthanize a very sick kinkajou. She was brought to us about a week ago after being attacked by a dog. She was very old, almost blind, missing a part of her tail and walking badly. She had improved a bit in the last week, but she was having a lot of pain and her eyes and legs wouldn’t recover anymore. It is just not fair to keep an animal alive under such bad conditions, so we decided to put her to sleep. After she passed away Louisa did a postmortem and found out that there was a lot more wrong under the skin of this animal, like more infections and bad lungs.

After putting her in a carton box and cleaning things up, we had a shower and dinner.

It was a strange, but interesting day.

Days like above, days which are never the same, often go different than planned and teach us a lot are part of the reason why I keep on coming back to help Merazonia in growing towards one of the best animal refuges in Ecuador. A refuge people can refer to when talking about taking good care of the animals. Only this way we can do something against the existence of the shitty places who call themselves animal refuges, but only want to gain money using confiscated animals. 

I still consider ‘working’ in the jungle of Merazonia as a privilege. Although I would get bored if I would have to take 24/7 care of a baby monkey, or feed and clean the cages of the other animals every day, I do have to admit that it gives a good feeling to be able to help. It is interesting to see the Samson and Sleven growing up,

the Tamarins changing from pets to free monkeys and some of the birds spreading their wings for the first time in the big bird cages.

Also the enthusiastic volunteers, people who believe in us and/or donate money are a great support.

Yes, all these reasons make it worth to deal with the difficulties and continue working/standing for the goals of Merazonia.

At the moment of writing I’m back in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. After my worst group/tour ever on Cuba, I´m glad that I got another change in guiding a tour with 24 people for Shoestring on the Maya Route. I was already getting very worried about my financial situation, since I still don’t want my friends to pay me for my ‘work’ at Merazonia, so this tour came right on time.

Saludos desde Playa,

Martijn

P.S. just after I left Merazonia it started to rain so hard that the water of Rio Tigre rose very high and the road from Mera to Puyo and Mera to Baños got floated. Is this the weather against the illegal work on the water tanks ;-)