Contributed by, Nicola Gothard

Firstly, apologies for my lengthy absence from this e-zine.  I was in Sulawesi, Indonesia for 2 months volunteering at an animal rescue centre. Then upon my return I was mentally and physically exhausted and spent the last few weeks sleeping metaphorically and physically. However with a rising mojo I am back! Sometimes we all just need a little time out, especially in fields where you care deeply about issues that are so wide-spread and commonplace that it can tie you up in knots trying to figure out where to begin.

I digress, back to April when I went to volunteer at Tasikoki Animal Rescue Center. Now despite my passion for animal welfare, up until this point I had never volunteered in the ‘field’  unless you count my local RSPCA cat shelter. It was a total shock to the system which wasn’t helped by the severe sun burn and heat stroke that struck me on my stop-over in Singapore. 

The first night there was unbearably hot and I didn’t sleep a wink. So I was up and showered by the time the alarm clock went off at 5.30 am! Simon took us on our first day to show us the ropes. It was hot and tiring.  There are a lot of hills in Tasikoki. I was also terrified of the Macaques. They were stressed and scared – much like myself.  I was shocked by the conditions that they were living in. I thought to myself that their enclosures wouldn’t pass a lab inspection back in the UK. Aside from two release groups in Large open enclosures, the other macaques were kept either in solitary cages and slept on bars or in what I called cell block H where they live in small concrete enclosures with chicken wire walls. I couldn’t decide which was worse, the macaques in solitary looked worse off because of the bars and isolation but they were a lot calmer than those in cell block H. I think this was because in the cell block the macaques had no visual escape from each other, which caused a lot of stress and aggression. (more…)