A long tailed macaque that arrived recently at IAR’s rescue centre in Indonesia was badly injured and in terrible pain when he was brought in. Thankfully IAR’s Veterinary Director in Indonesia, Karmele Llano Sanchez, carried out extensive surgery on him to ease his suffering.
The monkey had been living in captivity in Jakarta but had managed to escape. Naturally he tried to bite anyone who attempted to catch him. Finding themselves unable to get hold of him, local people tried to shoot him with an air rifle. Luckily the animal survived the attempt to kill him and was rescued shortly afterwards. An emergency operation was carried out to remove several of the small bullets from his body. After being moved to our rehabilitation centre in Ciapus, Karmele carried out a second operation, not only to locate the remaining bullets, but also on his teeth which had been severely damaged while he was living in captivity.
X-rays showed that the monkey still had some bullets lodged in his body, but in places where it would be difficult to operate: for example, a bullet had penetrated into his thorax. Owing to the small size of the bullets, no complications were expected and Karmele decided to leave them where they were.
The monkey’s teeth were a different story: almost all of them had been broken off, probably to prevent the animal from biting. It looked as though this had been done a long time ago, making it very difficult to operate and remove the remaining bits of teeth which were severely infected. Karmele operated for several hours until it was decided that further operations should be postponed because the macaque had already been under sedation for a long time. He is now left with almost no teeth at all, but at least the pain has gone.
This story reminds us all once again that macaque monkeys are not suitable as pets. We hope the people who kept him captive have at least learned from this sad story and will leave wildlife in the wild in future, where it belongs.