Dear Editor,
On October 23 my neighbour was passing by Rusal on Forshaw St and saw a man leading a small anteater on a rope; feeling sorry for the animal he bought the anteater for $2000 and brought it home. His wife called and asked if I knew what anteaters ate since they didn’t have any ants handy. She said they wanted to return it to the wild but didn’t know how to go about it and wanted to feed it since it looked hungry. I went to visit the anteater and apart from cuts on his face and on his body, he looked very stressed. The next day I passed by Rusal and asked the driver of one of Rusal’s trucks if he had brought the anteater from the interior; he said yes, that he had picked it up on the Linden-Ituni road. He said the anteater appeared to have had an accident. I talked to the young driver and his assistant about the importance of leaving wildlife in their natural habitat and departed.
With a quick visit to the Internet we discovered that our new friend was a Southern Tamandua, Collared Anteater, about 45 inches long – 25″ in body and head and 20″ of tail. He had a black patch from shoulder to rump that encircled his forelimbs; the rest of the body was a tan-brown colour. According to the Internet, Tamanduas eat mainly arboreal ants and termites and are thought to eat bees, honey and some kinds of fruit. After a series of phone calls to vets and wildlife people it was learned that in captivity they are known to eat cat chow with a little milk; this proved to be the case with the anteater.
The anteater was cared for by my neighbour for about ten days during which we begin to look for a suitable home in the interior; suitable being wet and dry forests near streams and rivers, especially those thick with vines. Contact was made with the Mendes family and they agreed to pick up the anteater and take him to their ranch in the Intermediate savannahs on the upper Berbice river, where there was an abundance of ants and termite nests. When Alex Mendes came to pick up the anteater, he found him “pale and very weak”; on the trail to Dubulay Ranch he showed signs of diarrhoea and he died before reaching his new home.
On Nov 8, my neighbour called again to tell me of another anteater in a friend’s yard on Eping Ave. We went with our dog kennel and met with Paul Fraser who told us that this anteater had made its way into his yard and unfortunately his dog caught and mauled it. Paul managed to get the anteater out of his dog’s mouth and it disappeared only to reappear in the yard of his next door neighbour. We picked up the Tamandua and carried him to our vet, Dr Davis. Unfortunately, by the time we reached Peter’s clinic this anteater also died. A week later a friend informed me that another Tamandua anteater was found dead in his neighbour’s yard after being mauled by his dog.
A couple of years ago I was driving home to Queenstown and had to make a sudden stop to keep from running over a two-toed sloth crossing the road in front of the vacant lot next to Guyenterprise on Lance Gibbs Street, where bush trucks used to park. This sloth was re-homed on the late Boyo Ramsaroop’s farm. Not long thereafter, some ‘street kids’ caught a sloth that was hanging around an old house on Regent Street and brought it to me for advice. My queries found that a young man working in the bush had trapped the sloth and brought it into town to show his friends and then, not knowing what to do with it, he let it loose. This sloth was also released on Boyo’s farm. Three months ago, while returning to Georgetown from Linden, I spotted a bush truck with a sloth dangling on the side, suspended by a rope. I followed the truck and when it stopped I talked to the driver and asked him to release the sloth to me, but he would not. He said he had promised it to a friend who was going to cook it.
When I think of all these first-hand experiences that just one person has had with anteaters and sloths over a short period of time, it makes me wonder about the magnitude of the problem. How many dozens, hundreds or thousands of animals are being brought in to Georgetown each year and eaten or abandoned after just a few hours of attentive curiosity?
Does it really make sense to allow people to freely catch and carry these wonderful animals away from their natural habitat, just to let them die a lonely death on the streets or in the yards of Georgetown homes? How can we stop this from happening?
As a starting point, perhaps companies engaged in mining, logging, agriculture and other hinterland enterprises could educate their employees and workers and prohibit the transport of wild animals on company vehicles.
Let’s all make an effort to educate people as to why our wildlife should be left in the wild.
‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’ (Martin Luther King, Jr)
Yours faithfully,
Syeada Manbodh
