In Madagascar, in 2019, a lemur, emaciated and suffering from advanced tuberculosis, was delivered to a rescue facility. Today he is dead.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himIt has been illegal to keep lemurs as pets in Madagascar since 1962, yet ring-tailed lemurs continue to be trapped and sold in an illegal trade. We are in southern Madagascar and here, in 2019, a female ring-tailed lemur, emaciated and suffering from advanced tuberculosis, was delivered to a rescue facility. An alarming mass the size of a golf ball protruded from the left side of his neck. The specimen then died.
He almost certainly "lived as a pet in someone's home and contracted tuberculosis by sharing food, dishes or air with an infected human," explains Marni LaFleur, an anthropologist at the University of San Diego, California, in a study. whose results appear in the latest issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (READ also: Madagascar: 95% of lemur species are threatened with extinction due to man).
It is the so-called "reverse zoonosis”, Which leaves little escape for the animals.
Nearly a third of the 107 lemur species, all found only in Madagascar, are critically endangered. The pet trade of lemurs has been banned there since 1962, but today it is estimated that Malagasy keep more than 30 pets locked up as "pets". Lemurs are often exhibited in resorts or "offered" for questionable photos on the beach. Many social media images, for example, show tourists giving them bananas directly from their mouth, increasing the chances of disease transmission, LaFleur says.
Ring-tailed lemurs and common brown lemurs are particularly preferred as pets, mainly because they live in large family groups and are easier to find, concludes Jonah Ratsimbazafy, a Malagasy primatologist, president of the International Primatological Society, a research organization and conservation.
Lemurs are unfortunately the most threatened group of mammals on the planet: almost all species, in fact, about 95%, are at risk of extinction and for this reason included in the 'Red List' of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). And the fault is ours alone.
Fonti: National Geographic / Emerging Infectious Diseases
Read also:
- The 25 primates at risk of extinction: the complete list
- Marsupial at risk of extinction for too much ... "love" (and grueling mating marathons)
- Endangered animals: mountain gorillas are now less than a thousand
