Manno’s origin is shrouded in mystery. From his facial characteristics it seems clear that he is a central chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes), which ranges in Angola (Cabinda), Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Fewer than 100,000 central chimpanzees remain the wild and IUCN classifies them as Endangered on the Red List, indicating that they have a high risk of extinction in the wild in the near future. They are also listed on Appendix I of CITES, which means that their commercial trade is prohibited.
Manno had the characteristic white face of the central chimpanzee when an infant. This Facebook photo from December 2013 shows him at the Duhok Zoo, aged about one year. He was probably born in late 2012 – but where? (Photo courtesy of Animals Lebanon)
Ramadan Hassan, the Duhok Zoo owner, said that Manno and another chimpanzee were purchased from a farm in Syria that was used as a holding area for wild animals smuggled in from Africa and sold to buyers throughout the Middle East. But Ramadan said many things that turned out to be false or contradictory. Ramadan said that he bought Manno from Erbil Zoo, and Dr. Sulaiman said that Ramadan brought two chimpanzees from Syria and sold Manno’s brother to the Erbil Zoo. Who knows?
It is equally possible that Manno originated in a zoo in Damascus that Jason Mier visited in 2009, which was advertising chimpanzees for sale. The zoo sold chimpanzees smuggled in from Africa on a regular basis.
A third possibility is that Manno was born in one of the two known breeding facilities in Egypt that illegally import and export great apes, and in which chimpanzee births have occurred. It is possible to drive from the Safaga Breeding Farm in Sharm el Sheikh to either Nuweiba or Taba and take a ferry to Aqaba, Jordan, then on by road to Amman and Damascus. PEGAS was told first-hand by one of the Egyptian traffickers that infant chimpanzees were simply put in suitcases and driven from Sharm to foreign destinations.
We know that Manno was taken by car from the Damascus area to the border with Iraq, where he was picked up by a driver from Erbil (we even have his mobile phone number) and taken there with another chimpanzee. The second chimpanzee, which was emotionally disturbed, has disappeared.
The chimpanzee that came with Manno from Damascus has disappeared from the Erbil Zoo. (Photo courtesy of Animals Lebanon)
The Erbil Zoo owner sold Manno to Ramadan Hassan, probably in late July 2013, as Ramadan had mobile phone photos of the chimpanzees taken then. A veterinary health import certificate for the two chimpanzees is dated 30 June 2013. Iraq did not belong to CITES until 2014, but Syria, a CITES Party, would still have been required to issue a CITES export permit and report it to the CITES Trade Database, which was not done. The trade was therefore illegal. Mr. Ramadan told Jason Mier that he knew of other chimpanzees that had gone to a Baghdad zoo and to wealthy buyers in Iran. A female chimpanzee that Ramadan wished to buy cost USD 30,000.
The veterinary health import document for Manno. (Photo courtesy of Animals Lebanon)
Jason Mier began receiving email reports in early October of two chimpanzees that had arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan, one at Erbil Zoo and one at Duhok Zoo. He rang the Erbil Zoo owner, Mr. Khalil Sabir Kawani, who said that he had bought them in Syria and sold one to Duhok Zoo. Jason then began in December 2013 an extended email and mobile phone exchange with various Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officials that dragged on for three months. During this time it was established by the KRG that the chimpanzees had been illegally imported.
While this was going on, a Canadian high school teacher named Spencer Sekyer volunteered to help out at the Kurdistan Organization for Animal Rights Protection (KOARP), based in Duhok. Although he had come to help out at their shelter for street dogs and cats, he made several visits to the Duhok Zoo, where he encountered Manno and established quite a friendship. Spencer was there only from 23 December 2013 to 4 January 2014, but he vowed to try and free Manno, as he could see that Manno’s future would be nothing but a solitary cage.
Manno was originally kept in a small cage at Duhok Zoo. (Courtesy of KOARP)
Spencer got to know the generous and energetic head of KOARP, Dr. Sulaiman Tameer, and the Duhok Zoo owner, Ramadan Hassan, during his stay. Spencer conducted a brief price survey of how much Ramadan paid for his exotic animals and established that Manno had cost USD 15,000. After returning to Canada in January 2014 Spencer began contacting all the organizations he could think of who might be able to help free Manno, without success for almost two years.
Dr. Sulaiman Tameer, on left, and Ramadan Hassan, on right, with Manno in 2014
Spencer’s notes on wild animal prices and trade routes.
Back to Jason – It was eventually established that Manno fell under the KRG Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources. The Minister agreed to meet with Jason on 19 March 2014, and Jason flew from Beirut to Erbil for the meeting with the aim of getting a seizure and agreement for relocation to a sanctuary. The Minister claimed during the meeting that he was unaware that private zoos such as the one in Duhok even existed, which demonstrates the need to publicize the existence of these facilities. There was a petition against such zoos, and a Facebook page publicizes animal welfare issues in Kurdistan, but evidently more needs to be done to sensitize the government to the issue.
The meeting went well and the minister agreed that the chimpanzee import had been illegal and that the ministry would cooperate in seizing Manno and turning him over to Jason for relocation to a sanctuary. After the meeting, however, lower level officials instructed to implement the minister’s orders used a series of excuses and delaying tactics that resulted in Jason returning to Beirut without Manno. Intensification of conflict in the region made further communications with the KRG on the subject of a chimpanzee rescue untenable, so Jason reluctantly halted his efforts.
Matters remained in limbo until September 2015, when Spencer attended a talk in Edmonton, Canada, given by Dr. Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee researcher and conservationist. After the talk, Spencer met with Jane and poured out his story of Manno.
Jane Goodall decided to try and help, and her efforts started the ball rolling again.
Jane Goodall is a good friend of Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary. When Spencer Sekyer pleaded for help to free Manno, Jane immediately thought of Sweetwaters. (Photo: PEGAS)
NEXT – The Saga of Manno – Permits
*This account is based on information provided by Jason Mier, head of Animals Lebanon, Dr. Sulaiman Tameer, head of KOARP, Spencer Sekyer, and from information that PEGAS has gathered from personal involvement and investigations.
This article was published in Mongabay.com on 10th May 2016. https://news.mongabay.com/2016/05/great-ape-trafficking-expanding-extractive-industry/
There are two main uses to which trafficked young apes are put: as pets or as attractions in commercial wildlife facilities (such as disreputable zoos, safari parks, circuses, hotels and use as photo-props).
The trade is facilitated by celebrities who pose with great ape pets in the press or in social media posts, which act as advertisements that say that owning an ape is “cool.”
Stiles has been investigating great ape trafficking for the past three years, since being invited to be a co-author of the United Nations report Stolen Apes, released in March 2013 at the 16th CITES Conference of the Parties in Bangkok.
Today his name is Manno and we believe he recently turned four years old, though he is small for his age. Manno has bright, inquisitive eyes, has a penchant for pumpkin seeds and loves to run and play. He has been living alone as the solitary chimpanzee in a small, private zoo in Duhok, Kurdistan, in northern Iraq for about three years.
“Manno turned up in 2013 with wildlife dealers in Damascus, Syria, as a traumatized baby orphan,” Spencer Sekyer told me. Spencer, a teacher in Canada, volunteered to help animals kept in the Duhok Zoo in Kurdistan in late 2014. He fell in love with Manno. “His mother was no doubt killed for bushmeat somewhere in Central Africa and the poachers sold him off to animal traffickers.”
Spencer has been trying to get Manno freed for over a year now.
Spencer showed me a colored piece of paper with prices written on it. “The owner of the Duhok Zoo paid US$15,000 for Manno, and the little chimpanzee has repaid the investment by becoming a very popular attraction. People come from all over the Duhok area to play and have their photographs taken with Manno… spending money.”
The zoo owner dresses the little chimpanzee up in children’s clothes and visitors shower him with food and drink that kids like — junk food. This probably explains why Manno is small for his age.
Manno eating pumpkin seeds bought for him by adoring zoo visitors. (Photo: Spencer Sekyer)
Two chimpanzees captured in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Manno very likely endured this before being smuggled to Syria. (Photo courtesy of the Jane Goodall Institute)
If Manno stays in the zoo, the day will come when he stops being cuddly and playful. He will grow in strength and in aggressiveness, as is normal with chimpanzees. If he is not caged up permanently first, he will attack and no doubt seriously injure someone. His future is not bright.
No bright future
In fact, the future is not bright for any great ape that is trafficked. There are two main uses to which young apes are put: as pets or as attractions in commercial wildlife facilities (such as disreputable zoos, safari parks, circuses, hotels and use as photo-props).
The trade is facilitated by celebrities who pose with great ape pets in the press or in social media posts, which act as advertisements that say that owning an ape is “cool”. The coordinator of the United Nations Great Ape Survival Partnership, Doug Cress, warned that celebrities do not realize that many of the apes were obtained illegally.
“These pictures are seen by hundreds of millions of fans, and it sends the message that posing with great apes — all of which are obtained through illegal means, and face miserable lives once they grow too big and strong to hold — is okay as long as it’s cute. But it’s not. It’s illegal, and it contributes to the destruction of already endangered species,” Cress told The Guardian newspaper.
Paris Hilton holding an infant orangutan in Dubai, a known wildlife smuggling center. Photos like this on social media create the impression that it is trendy to keep ape pets. Photo via Instagram.
I have been investigating great ape trafficking for the past three years, since being invited to be a co-author of the United Nations report “Stolen Apes,” released in March 2013 at the 16th CITES Conference of the Parties in Bangkok. The report documents an alarming situation in which more than 1,800 cases were registered of trafficked chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans being lost to the forests of Africa and Asia between 2005 and early 2012.
This is only a fraction of the real number, as documented cases are those involving seizures by the authorities, and the vast majority of incidents go undetected. More tragically, for every live ape that enters the trade, at least one — the mother — and more than ten can be killed as collateral damage. The number lost is multiplied again because many infants die before reaching the intended destination.
I’ve traveled to West and Central Africa, the Middle East, and most recently made a trip to Thailand, Vietnam, and China, gathering information on this 21st century slave trade. I have also been discovering and monitoring a growing network of online wildlife traffickers, who post photos of their prized wildlife acquisitions and those for sale on social media sites. Unfortunately, recent publicity naming those involved in the illegal trade has resulted in them closing Instagram and Facebook accounts and going underground.
Publishing the names of online traffickers simply drives them underground where they can no longer be easily monitored. Composite of images found on Instagram.
Great apes are becoming increasingly expensive. Of a trade in December last year, Patricia Trichorache from the Cheetah Conservation Fund told me, “Right now there are two baby chimps about to be shipped to Dubai … $40,000 each.” An owner flaunting a $40,000 pet on Facebook or Instagram gains instant prestige. It is common to see friends’ posts saying, “I want one sooo bad,” followed by a string of heart emojis.
Dealers also use social media sites to market their wares. The usual routine is to move to the encrypted WhatsApp or Snapchat to conduct the negotiations after the initial contact is made on a photo post.
Traffickers commonly post apes for sale online to solicit buyers. Image via Instagram.
In the Gulf countries, infant chimpanzees and orangutans are commonly dressed up in designer clothes, made to wear sunglasses and baseball caps to look cool, and are fed junk food and taught to smoke. I’ve even seen chimpanzees, orangutans, gibbons, and lion cubs all playing together in videos posted on Instagram. Sometimes the play goes too far and the little apes are terrorized, which only elicits laughter from the owner and his friends who gather in carpeted livingrooms to watch the “fun.”
The typical road a slave-ape takes in a commercial zoo or safari park starts with being used as a photo prop. When they get older they are usually trained to perform in some kind of entertainment show and after they reach puberty they are caged up to become a zoo attraction and to breed. Increasingly, dealers and zoos are breeding their own animals.
In Thailand, a large crocodile farm and zoo uses infant chimpanzees and orangutans as photo props, then cages them up for life when they get too old. Photos by Daniel Stiles.
The Egypt excess
Traffickers in Egypt were amongst the first to see the financial advantages in breeding great apes. A woman with dual Egyptian and Nigerian nationality had been trafficking chimpanzees and gorillas out of Kano, in Nigeria, and Guinea since at least the early 1990s, assisted by family members and an Egyptian pediatrician. Two of her clients run holidaymaker hotels in Sharm el Sheikh that used young chimpanzees as photo props with tourists.
Both hotel owners have since the early 2000s established wildlife breeding facilities for great apes and other animals. Chimpanzees and even gorillas are now being smuggled from these breeding centers to other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. They often go to Damascus first to pick up a CITES re-export permit, which corrupt officials issue for a price, so that they can arrive in the destination country with documentation that makes it look like a legal trade.
A baby chimpanzee from one of the Egyptian breeding facilities was seized in the Cairo airport last year during the security check, being smuggled to Kuwait, where infant great apes are in high demand.
Dina Zulfikar, a well known Egyptian animal welfare activist, followed the case of little Doodoo, as they named him. Dina told me, “The authorities did not follow procedure. They let the trafficker go and did not file a case with the police, as the law requires.” This is an all too typical story in countries with lax law enforcement.
Poor Doodoo now languishes in the Giza Zoo in precarious conditions. Dina recently informed me that his cellmate Bobo died of unknown causes, after another chimpanzee Mouza died some months earlier. The Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya offered to rescue the little chimpanzee and provide him with lifelong care, but the Egyptian CITES authorities thus far have not responded to the offer. Little Doodoo could join five other chimpanzees at Sweetwaters that were seized in Kenya in 2005 after being refused entry into Egypt, trafficked by the Egyptian-Nigerian woman.
Today Doodoo languishes in a rusting cage because the Egyptian CITES authorities refuse to allow him to go to a proper sanctuary. Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya has offered to pay all expenses to relocate him there, to join five other chimpanzees that were rescued from Egyptian traffickers in 2005. Photo by Dina Zulfikar.Doodoo with a zoo veterinarian shortly after he was brought to the Giza Zoo. He was found in the carry-on luggage of a trafficker smuggling him to Kuwait. Photo by Dina Zulfikar.
Ian Redmond, head of the U.K.-based Ape Alliance, worked with Dian Fossey and mountain gorillas in the 1980s, before Fossey’s untimely murder, recounted in the film Gorillas in the Mist. I work closely with Ian on the problem of great ape trafficking and he has tried, without success, to rescue the chimpanzees and gorillas held illegally by the Egyptian breeding facilities.
After a visit in 2015 to meet with the great ape breeders in Egypt, Ian told me, “Recent shipments out of Egypt seem likely to be infants bred at G. O.’s [name withheld] facility – if so we are faced with a different problem: essentially, a chimpanzee baby farm where infants are pulled from their mother and bottle-fed to be sold.”
The wildlife breeding facility in Sharm el Sheikh is on the grounds of this hotel. When the author visited it in November 2014 he witnessed the purchase of three addax, loaded in the crate in the back of the pickup truck. Addax are listed as Critically Endangered by IUCN and are CITES Appendix I. No addax are reported exported from Egypt in 2014 or 2015, although 12 are from other countries. Photo by Daniel Stiles.
The situation has been reported to the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), based in Geneva, but they reply that “it is up to the national CITES Management Authority to take action.”
Overlooked Fact
The number of great apes trafficked internationally every year is not large compared to some other species, but when the collateral damage is factored in we are talking about up to 3,000 lives lost from the wild each year, which is close to one percent of the great ape global population.
One important fact is overlooked when simply numbers are used to assess the significance of this extractive industry. Great apes are unlike any other species group. We humans share millions of years of evolutionary history with them and our genetic makeup is surprisingly similar — about 97% with orangutans, 98% with gorillas, and almost 99% with chimpanzees and bonobos. We all belong to the same biological family called Hominidae.
Increasingly, as more behavioral and genetic research is conducted, we are accepting more easily the fact that great apes are very much like humans in so many ways. Just recently, Jane Goodall was quoted as saying, “Chimpanzees taught me how to be a better mother,” indicating just how much great apes are similar to us.
Ian Redmond, who studies ape behavior, says that “Great ape mothers are incredibly protective of their children, which is why they are always killed when poachers go out hunting for infants to sell.”
All hominid mothers are incredibly protective of their children. Photos by GRASP and Daniel Stiles.
Beginning in the 1960s, the National Geographic Society was instrumental in funding the research of the Trimates — Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birutė Galdikas. These three exceptional women carried out long-term research respectively of chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, and orangutans. They made known to the world the surprising fact that characteristics previously thought of as exclusively human are shared by these intelligent, emotionally sensitive great apes.
The Nonhuman Rights Project, led by attorney Steven Wise, has been leading a mission in the United States “to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere ‘things,’ which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to ‘persons,’ who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them.”
The project is focusing on freeing captive chimpanzees, because a chimpanzee (and other great apes), as Wise argues, “is a cognitively complex, autonomous being who should be recognized as having the legal right to bodily liberty.”
A documentary film about Wise’s work, Unlocking the Cage, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January to a packed house and a standing ovation. It will be shown around the world on HBO in July. This film could very well be the hominid version of Blackfish, the film that brought the suffering of captive killer whales in marine parks to the world’s attention, and which has launched a campaign to halt this appalling practice. Sea World announced recently that it would halt killer whale breeding and phase out its theatrical shows using them.
Wise and his colleagues have been battling in court to free the chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo from inhumane captivity, and recently they gained a huge victorywhen it was announced that not only Leo and Hercules, but all of the 220 chimpanzees at the University of Louisiana’s New Iberia Research Center, will be freed and sent to a sanctuary. Argentine courts have already ruled that an orangutan named Sandra deserved the basic rights of a “non-human person” and can be freed from a Buenos Aires zoo and transferred to a sanctuary. Likewise, New Zealand and Spain have extended personhood rights to great apes.
Legal systems are increasingly recognizing that it is immoral for nonhuman hominids to be bought and sold, put into captivity and suffer abuse for any reason. Currently, CITES treats great apes like any other animal or plant species. Although classified in Appendix I, which means that commercial trade is prohibited, great apes can be traded for “non-commercial” purposes if they satisfy certain criteria.
Creating exceptions to the prohibition on international trade in great apes tacitly accepts that it is appropriate for humans to own and imprison them. Once in captivity, it is very difficult to monitor whether they are being used for commercial purposes or are being abused in other ways.
Already, hundreds of great apes are being freed in Europe and the U.S. from biomedical research laboratories, and very soon chimpanzees from private commercial zoos in the U.S. will be liberated, due to changes in laws and understanding of the uniqueness of great apes. This is creating a huge problem of where to put them, once liberated. If all commercial wildlife facilities stretching from the Middle East to the Far East are included, it quickly becomes apparent that all great apes cannot be immediately emancipated after changes in law might come into effect.
Chimpanzees are free to roam and socialize as they wish in Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary on Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Although Sweetwaters can take 30 or more additional chimpanzees, this is not sufficient to handle all those currently held as a result of illegal trade. Photo by Daniel Stiles.
CITES must act
So what is the answer? Change should be planned, gradual, and move in stepped phases. The first step is stopping the illegal trade, which adds every year to the number that eventually will have to be freed. CITES could be instrumental in achieving this, but it is not implementing what needs to be done. Other organizations concerned with great apes also are not doing all that they could be doing. Attempts to strengthen CITES actions to crack down on great ape trafficking at the last CITES Standing Committee meeting in January 2016 were actually undermined by organizations that profess to be helping great apes.
CITES needs to put teeth into the resolution that deals with great apes. There should be a system of registration and monitoring of institutions and individuals that possess great apes, so that new arrivals and movements can be detected. Currently, great apes arrive illegally in countries and are internally transferred and re-exported with little monitoring. Zoo studbooks are often out of date and inaccurate, as my research has found. The CITES Trade Database records only a small fraction of great apes that are traded internationally.
The Orangutan Show at a safari park in the suburbs of Bangkok, Thailand, has been making use of trafficked great apes from Indonesia for years. Thai law prohibits these performances, which include boxing matches, and dozens of orangutans have even been seized and returned to Indonesia, but the safari park replaces them and carries on. There is no system of registration and monitoring in place, which would prevent such abuses. Photos by Daniel Stiles.
Will Manno and others like him ever be freed to live with others of his kind in a sanctuary, enjoying social life, natural vegetation, and security? Will the day ever come when unthinking people will realize that chimpanzees and orangutans are not playthings and objects of entertainment? They are our family members.
As Dame Jane Goodall says, “In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes.”
Author’s note: All social media photographs in this article are screen shots from accounts open to the public. In May of 2014 I began working with a project funded by the Arcus Foundation called the Project to End Great Ape Slavery — PEGAS for short. The project is sponsored by the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya and it works in association with the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary. See FreeTheApes.org. I am also Coordinator of the Ape Alliance Great Ape Trade Working Group. I invite readers to visit our page and sign the pledge to never use a great ape as a pet.
Jason Mier of Animals Lebanon, a PEGAS partner, has sent us the draft of the Animals Protection and Welfare Law. It is one of the most advanced pieces of legislation that we have ever seen for protecting wild, domestic and farm animals from mistreatment. The contents of this bill could be used as a template to be initiated in many other countries, particularly where abuses are well known. If anyone would like to see a copy, please contact PEGAS. The following article from the Lebanon Daily Star provides a summary:
The smile hasn’t left the face of Animals Lebanon Director Jason Mier since it was announced Wednesday that the organization’s animal welfare bill had been approved by the Cabinet after over three years of campaigning.
“So much time and resources, by so many good people, and the outcome is exactly what we hoped for,” Mier tells The Daily Star.
The group first began thinking about the project back in September 2009 after Mier attended a conference in Jordan on animal welfare in the region and the importance of legislation.
“Then there was more than a year of research, understanding laws in the region, international conventions, best practices and general trends of animal welfare worldwide, and legislation that directly influences Lebanon (EU, trading partners and so on),” he says, before the group began putting pen to paper.
The draft law was then presented to the Ministry of Agriculture and international organizations for animal welfare such as CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) and OIE (World Organization for Animal Health) for feedback.
What followed was the public launch of the draft law in November 2011 under the patronage of then-Agriculture Minister Hussein Hajj Hasan, a near yearlong consultation process between Animals Lebanon and the ministry to refine the law – under the final say of Animals Lebanon – and a revised version of the law launched in February 2013 for public feedback.
The campaign then continued under the new agriculture minister, Akram Chehayeb, who submitted the final draft for Cabinet approval in late October 2014.
“The purpose of this law is to ensure the protection and welfare of live animals and regulate establishments which handle or use such animals, in compliance with the related international conventions and regulations, especially CITES and OIE,” Article 2 of the draft law states.
Approved by the Cabinet Wednesday, the comprehensive bill has articles detailing the appropriate response in line with animal welfare in scenarios ranging from general handling, to strays, to outlawing the giving of animals as prizes.
The welfare of animals in Lebanon has been brought to the fore recently following multiple scandals that broke out after Health Minister Wael Abu Faour began a crackdown on food safety standards back in November.
Since, there have been closures and improvements made in slaughterhouses but there are still many instances where animal welfare falls short. While the problems associated with stray animals and the municipalities handling of them have been gaining attention, there are also less publicized issues, such as dog fighting.
“Even on the waterfront we’ve seen dog fighting,” Mier tells The Daily Star. “Some of these people are online – there are people with websites now on how to train your animals for fighting, which steroids to give them, locally made products to be able to train for fighting.”
The Animals Protection and Welfare Law seeks to criminalize such behavior, and provide a comprehensive set of regulations to standardize and improve the conditions of animals in Lebanon.
“The law is also for the public good, [it] improves our compliance with international conventions, and improved animal welfare can bring economic, social and health benefits for individual citizens and society as a whole,” Mier says.
While it has now passed through Cabinet, the bill must still be approved by Parliament to be published in the Official Gazette and become law.
Animals Lebanon is confident of passing that final hurdle. The organization has been in contact with MPs from the beginning of the campaign and believes there is a lot of support for the bill in Parliament.
There is still much work to be done however, Mier says, both in terms of having the law enacted and then enforced.
“Compliance of any law is never 100 percent, this is why there are police and penalties, and enforcement is never 100 percent as there are always going to be competing priorities. What we want to see, and expect to see, is a continual increase in the compliance and enforcement,” he says.
With the organization now turning its focus to the passage of the bill through Parliament, they acknowledge that that the law is “not an end or solution” but rather a “vital tool” in continuing to make animal welfare improvements in Lebanon.
Richard Vigne CEO, Ol Pejeta Conservancy Stephen Ngulu Deputy Manager, Ol Pejeta Conservancy Daniel Stiles Project Manager, PEGAS Tom Butynski Director of Research, Sustainability Centre Eastern Africa Alpana Patel Jane Goodall Institute, Kenya Yvonne de Jong Eastern Africa Primate Diversity and Conservation Program, Kenya
Project to End Great Ape Slavery (PEGAS) 