Video prompts call to end Indonesian macaque trade

A British animal rights group demanded Tuesday that Indonesia end trade in endangered long-tailed macaques, releasing video footage and images of men removing the monkeys from the wild. The video released by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) shows several men capturing the monkeys in the jungle in central Java's Yogyakarta region, bagging and then cramming them into small crates and cages. "This footage is a shocking confirmation of the cruelty and suffering that Indonesia allows to be inflicted on its wild populations of macaques," BUAV co-director Sarah Kite told AFP. "We urge the international community to voice its objections not only to this cruelty but to also raise concerns about the conservation status of this species." The British-based group campaigns for an end to lab experiments using animals. The long-tailed macaque is listed as threatened under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and tops the list of the most-heavily traded animals in the world. Kite said the monkeys in the footage were trapped for CV Universal Fauna, a Jakarta-based primate supplier that exports monkeys overseas. The company was not immediately available to comment. Indonesian primates are mostly exported to the United States and Japan for research, while locally, they are sold at local markets as pets and are forced to perform dances on the street for entertainment. Photographs taken by the British group on visits to markets in Jakarta as well as central and eastern Java between last August and October showed young monkeys with bleached fur stuffed into cramped wire cages for sale. Global exports in long-tailed macaques has expanded significantly in the past decade, with the number sharply rising to 261,823 between 2004 and 2008, from 119,373 between 1999 and 2003, the group said.