Confiscated from animal smugglers, meat-market peddlers and souvenir collectors, they're usually too malnourished or too young to be returned to the wild. Sometimes their tails have been so badly injured and infected from hunter's snares that we have to cut them off to save their lives. To help these beleaguered animals, he founded the Endangered Primate Rescue Center in 1993, outside Cuc Phuong National Park with the approval of the Vietnamese National University. Injured primates get nursed back to health within a five-acre enclosure of jungle next to the country's oldest national park.
Care is taken to make sure everything is as natural as possible.
Instead of feeding the primates commercial monkey chow, for example, a dozen staff members harvest hundreds of pounds of leaves from the jungle each day. Complete with veterinary clinic and quarantine station, the rescue center is the first of its kind in Vietnam. It also serves as a hedge against extinction. The center doesn't have room to accept every monkey, so it focuses on the rarest and most endangered ones. A visitor can see species of leaf-eating monkeys, or langurs, that aren't found in any zoo.