Fighting the illegal wildlife trade means investing more in animal sanctuaries

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This year the United Nations World Wildlife Day (WWD) theme was “Conservation Finance: Investing in People and Planet.” As a cultural anthropologist who studies conservation, I don’t think a lot about finance, but I do think about money: $25 billion, and $25, two amounts so far apart they make my head spin.

The wildlife trade is the world’s fourth most lucrative illegal trade behind arms, drugs and human trafficking. It generates nearly $25 billion annually. When people hear about it, they think ivory, armed park rangers or rhinos, whose horns are now worth more than diamonds and gold. But few know about the primate sanctuaries tucked deep in Africa’s forests, or that they’re the key to protecting chimpanzees in the wild. I study these sanctuaries, as well as law enforcement nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), in Cameroon. The NGOs run sting operations with local governments to catch poachers and traffickers, and sanctuaries provide “forever homes” to the orphaned chimps that NGOs rescue.

It gets tricky because groups on the law enforcement side receive funds from big-name organizations and foreign governments, while sanctuaries must stretch donations — like the $25 it costs to sponsor a chimp — to drastic lengths to fund their work. It is nearly impossible for chimps who’ve lived with humans to successfully return to the wild. They may not have the skills they need to survive or they may mistake poachers for safe humans. Since chimps can live for 60 years in captivity, each new orphan extends a sanctuary’s work decades into the future.

For my research, I helped raise one of those orphans: Daphne. Her story illuminates why we need to prioritize sanctuaries and why right now — when the American government is gutting conservation worldwide — is the time to do it.

Daphne’s rescue made headlines in 2014. Cameroonian officials and the Last Great Ape Organization (LAGA), a law enforcement NGO, confiscated Daphne during a sting operation. She was 4 months old. In the grainy, washed-out photo that ran with the story, Daphne sits vacant-eyed and emaciated on a pink and white tile floor. Her rescue made international news because officials confiscated six charred chimp heads and 30 chimp hands and feet along with Daphne. In the photo, they’re burnt black and arranged in a line behind her. They were the heads and hands of her family.

During my first stint at Ape Action Africa in Cameroon, in 2016, I watched Daphne for signs of her past, after someone told me who she was. I’d read about her rescue before I started doing “forest shifts” with her and her adoptive brother, Little Larry. Both chimps were still under the age of 2; during eight-hour shifts, we imitated chimp vocalizations and gestures and tried to give them some semblance of what they would have gotten from their mothers.

Her mother was gone, but they’d carved out a little piece of forest where she could start over and grow.

I couldn’t reconcile stories about Daphne’s arrival with who she was when we met. Caregivers believe that most chimps remember their mothers being killed, especially Daphne who woke up screaming at night when she first arrived. She could only sleep when her caregivers pushed their beds together and put her between them. But, a year later, Daphne loved playing tag and foraging for sour berries that stained her face red. Her hair was soft and black, her face ash brown. She had a little white goatee and stiff fingers that she used like chopsticks.

Then, one evening in the forest I lost track of time. Little Larry was on the ground, deciding if he was going to poke a millipede, and Daphne had been high in a tree for almost an hour. I saw the time, jumped up and grabbed the fruit bucket, all at once. I heard Daphne before I called up to her.

She was shrieking. Her voice shook, and her cries looped back in on themselves like a siren. She flew down the tree, snapping branches as she went. I knew infant chimps who’d broken bones and gouged their eyes out falling from trees; I froze. About eight feet from the ground, she jumped. I stumbled when I caught her, and chimp-panted with her until she stilled. I saw what I had been watching for — whether there was a part of her that hadn’t healed. There was. She was still terrified of being left behind.

From then on, I sat whenever I called her down out of the trees, and I realized that the sanctuary hadn’t just taken her in. They were helping Daphne make a life, and they were good at it. She’d come far in a year. Her mother was gone, but they’d carved out a little piece of forest where she could start over and grow.

Over the past 20 years, the demand for chimpanzees has shifted. Buyers in the Middle East want them as pets, and zoos in Eastern Europe and China order them to attract visitors and sell close “encounters” with a cute exotic animal. Infants sell for as much as $100,000, and social media makes transactions easy. While 50 of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Google, Meta, Amazon and now TikTok, formed the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, in 2018, the threat to chimps like Daphne is still rampant.

When it comes to funding, things get even more complicated. Although Africa’s 23 accredited primate sanctuaries have a dual mission — to care for orphaned primates and help conserve those in the wild — most don’t qualify for the bulk of conservation funding because they’re classified as “captive” settings. What funders don’t recognize is that supporting sanctuaries is supporting chimps in the wild; officials can’t make arrests without a place to take confiscated chimps.

And now, as of February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services' funds have been frozen and projects that protect millions of critically endangered species have stopped. Thousands of people in conservation lost their jobs. Fewer rangers patrolling national parks makes it easier to traffic not just protected species, but also drugs and guns. And stopping climate change programs will have repercussions we cannot imagine.

Being forced to fight for our most basic rights means we’re compelled to rethink who we are and reimagine what’s possible. Do we want a world with chimpanzees? If so, it’s time to fight for more money, not make do with less, and it’s time to include sanctuaries in conversations about conservation finance.

Daphne is 12 years old now. I haven’t seen her in five years, but I get updates. She spends her days in tall trees with her adoptive family. She has best friends and still likes to play tag.  Because of the sanctuary, Daphne is allowed to grow up. And because Daphne is safe, there’s another chimp with her own family, still out there in the wild.

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