Wani Care Foundation

As you all could have read in the update of our website of July 2009, we were very busy to arrange the translocation of our orang-utans Noni and Dodo to the rehabilitation centre in Nyarumenteng in Kalimantan. All the paper work in order to get approval from the goverment had been done, so they were ready to go!
unfortunately we received bad news from the rehabilitation centre that Noni and Dodo were not welcome anymore, because of all sorts of reasons. We are so sad about this news: we are already trying for such a long time to find a permanent home for these amazing animals and they deserve it so much! But unfortunately we have bad luck every time!
First there were the problems with the arrangement of the translocation papers at the goverment and now the rehabilitation centre is posing problems.
It is uncertain where they will go now, but ofcourse we’ll fight as hard as we can to find a good place for them!

Dodo playing with water

Noni eating leafs

Saturday the 14th of November 2009 we saved two gibbons from the hands of people who live in a little village two hours from Cikananga. In this area, unfortunately, a lot of gibbons are held by people who treat the gibbons poorly. A few years ago this area was still woody and a lot of wild animals were still living there, including the gibbon. Unfortunately huge parts of the forests were cut down and the parents of many baby gibbons were killed. The little baby gibbons were sold to people living in the surrounding villages. The gibbons we found are Dompoe, a five-year old female gibbon and the little two-year old baby Jollie. Little gibbon babies like Jollie should have constant care from their mother, but Jollie sadly never had this. Her owner had fastened her with a chain on a bamboo stick and had given her a little house where she could shelter. She was totally left to her fate. Luckily we were able to take these gibbons away from their horrible circumstances and hopefully we can offer them a good future again. We will introduce Dompoe and Jollie to each other and hopefully this will work out well and they can become buddies! At the moment they are not healthy at all: they are very thin and have a bad pelt, but with good nutrition with a lot of proteins they will hopefully be much stronger soon. If they are strong enough they will be brought to the Java gibbon centre in Bogor; more of our gibbons have been brought there. In this centre they will be socialized and they will learn how to take care of themselves when brought in nature. Eventually it is our goal to release them in the national park. Hopefully Dompoe and Jollie will be stronger soon!

In the beginning of 2009 I have written a letter to Stichting Aap with the question whether they would be interested to help Wanicare and PPSC by means of sponsoring or advice. Resit (PPSC Cikananga) and I were very happy to get the opportunity from Stichting AAP to talk about our project. We were delighted to hear that Stichting AAP decided to help us! They have given us a probationary period of six months where we have to show that PPSC can be a good and professional centre. At this moment we are working really hard to improve and after six months Stichting Aap will decide whether they want to have permanent cooperation with us. We are very happy with this opportunity and we will do everything that we can to show Stichting Aap that we can be a good, motivated and professional centre and that we are able to maintain this.

Sunday the 20th of September, I will leave again to Indonesia. I will be there for three months and will work at the Cikananga animal rescue  center again. Hopefully we can do even more work than has been done last period!

Recently Wanicare has received some amazing donations of medicines: the company MERIAL (that has animal health as one of its goals) donated us omec that helps agains ecto-and endo parasites. We can use this for almost al our animals!
Moreover, the Apenheul (a zoo in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands) donated us Suprelorin that we will use to temporarily castrate our leaf monkeys. This is because we don’t want them to reproduce in our center, but this way they can still reproduce in nature (where we hope they will go some day).
I want to thank them very much for their donations!