To start off, I will say that the one positive thing that I got out of my internship with Alouatta Sanctuary is that it really opened my eyes to the fact that not all those who work in the animal/conservation world really care about the animals. I had to deal with “bosses” who were demeaning and rude and largely absent, another thing I had not done beforehand, especially when working with animals. The summer I was there, back in 2015, almost every single intern left early (over 8 of us left—including 3 the first full day that I arrived). At first, we all kind of hoped that it was a fluke with our summer. That is, we hoped that the way Seth and Jolie (the directors) were acting towards us and the animals was a one-time thing because of stress or something. But now we realize that it wasn’t. The first time I was in David at a hostel, and I told the owner where I was coming from, his reaction was, “Oh, you’re at the scam sanctuary!”. By this point, I already knew what the sanctuary was like, but I didn’t know that many of the locals referred to it as such. I had tried finding reviews before going, but seeing as I could find no bad ones—which, given, was a bit suspicious seeing as every place has at least one bad review—I figured it would be fine. Now I realize they have TripAdvisor take down any negative reviews (which defeats the point of the site, no?) so here we go… I don’t expect a sanctuary to necessarily be very friendly to people. It’s always a plus, but I also understand that the animals tend to come first. After all, that’s the entire point of a sanctuary. However, that wasn’t even the case here. Several incidents have allowed me to really see that the reason Seth and Jolie are in this is for the money and the glory, not for the animals. First, there was a blind howler monkey, Stevie, on the sanctuary. During one of our first group meetings with Seth and Jolie, Jolie announced their plans to still release Stevie in the wild, insisting that she would survive (despite the fact that she had trouble in areas she was even familiar with) and that Rugby—another howler monkey at the time that was about the same age as her but not in any way related to her—would take care of her. It was once she said those words that I realized how little they know about animal behavior. Releasing this monkey would mean her death. Either by starvation or at the hands of another wild animal, or even by a falling tree (this was on a teak plantation). Just a few weeks later, Seth and Jolie just an hour and a half away in David, Stevie was attacked by one of the adult males of one of the wild troops. Terrified (she obviously hadn’t seen the attack coming), she plummeted out of the trees and to the ground—thankfully it was low tide so there was no water in the mangroves—and one of the managers ran after her (I do have to say, Ailsa and Jess were amazing managers, despite Seth and Jolie). When she brought her back up, Stevie was covered in bites and scratches, and couldn’t move one of her hands very well at all. Seth and Jolie were contacted, but they stayed in David (apparently, Jolie “didn’t sleep well in the jungle”—despite the fact we were beside a half-rainforest, half-plantation area and living in a field) and didn’t even have a vet come out to see the hurt monkey. When I left, weeks later, Stevie was still having trouble moving those fingers. Then, there was Angie the capuchin. This is where a lot of friction began generating between the directors (and some of the managers) and the interns. Angie was attacked by the wild capuchins through the fencing of the enclosure she shared with Ace, the other capuchin. So she was brought to the house of the woman that owns the property (Nixa, who I had the pleasure of meeting once and was a wonderful lady, despite what Seth and Jolie would sometimes say about her) along with one of the managers who was injured in the field (although I understand the need for time to recuperate, another intern was laughed at by Seth after being attacked by Angie when she asked if she could go to a clinic or something to have the bite checked out). This manager would take Angie out of her dog crate every couple of hours to walk her around on a leash in the backyard, and then put her back. Well, one day, Angie somehow escaped the dog crate and the house, and was never seen again. A mistake by the manager, yes, but it was how it was handled afterward that had the rest of us weary of Seth and Jolie. First, we were told by the managers (after they spoke with Seth and Jolie) that Angie would be fine because it turns out that she had actually lived in the wild for 10 years before becoming a pet and Nixa’s house backed up right into a rainforest corridor (the validity of which none of us know, as one intern reported that he saw one tree in the backyard but not a forest, and he wasn’t aware of this whole thing going on when he arrived, so it was an unbiased report). When we asked how they knew she had lived in the wild before, we were told that Jolie had interviewed this island community that had seen Angie up in the trees before. When there were murmurs of confusion about this story, it suddenly turned into that the vet could tell by looking at her teeth (although why this didn’t happen when Angie was first brought to the sanctuary, none of us know). Any questions about the subject, no matter how nicely they were brought up, were answered with hostility and accusations. Another problem with the capuchin situation is that capuchins love water. They love to wash their food in it, splash in it, drink it. It’s important for them. The only water bowl they had in the enclosure was small, think the size of a salad bowl that you serve from, and cracked and plastic and filthy. We would often bring up in meetings that we should get another bowl for them. Ace would usually spill the water almost immediately whenever we filled it up (and when we were there, it wasn’t raining all that often, so the water tank at the top of the “hike”, where the baby howlers/capuchins were kept, wasn’t all that filled). We started bringing up jugs of water with us on the hike, but even those wouldn’t be enough. In the heat, the water would evaporate almost immediately. But whenever we brought up buying them a small plastic kiddie pool (this way, we could at least fill it up with some jugs of water and it wouldn’t spill out the cracks, or it could be filled with rainwater when it did rain), we were told there wasn’t enough money in the budget (which we weren’t allowed to see). Each of us was paying $1,000 a month, there were about 11 of us there on average, and the majority of the food we, and the monkeys, ate would be rotten by halfway through the week. Furthermore, all of the water was from the rain, we rarely turned on the generator (maybe once a week, except if Seth was there, then he would have it running all the time), and they weren’t paying property taxes or anything. And Seth and Jolie were able to go on surfing trips, fly to and from San Diego, wear Lulu Lemon, drive the car everywhere (so lots of gas…even once driving all the way to the sanctuary to pick up another intern that they were obsessed with to go surfing with him, just to find out that via lack of communication he was actually in David with the rest of us for our half-day and they had driven that entire way for nothing. The driveway alone would be an hour round-trip worth of gas. But they wouldn’t let the managers take the car to take the bitten intern to a clinic, and whenever they were around, just had us pay to taxi ourselves everywhere), and more, but couldn’t spend some money for a new water bowl for the capuchins. There were also two tamarins on the property. They were ex-pets, apparently, had to be kept separate because they were hostile with each other. So they were kept in fairly small cages (not tall enough for us to stand up in, and just about 2 meters wide, tops) and were, when there were enough interns, given enrichment and human contact for a few hours each morning (again, if there were enough interns. But with so many leaving, they quickly lost priority). They were kept near where we lived, and this way, whenever visitors came around, they were shown the tamarins. These social animals were just being kept in solitary. When we asked about sending them to another sanctuary with tamarins, we were told “things fell through”. Furthermore, they were not native to the area, so they couldn’t even be set free. Essentially, they were just pets once again, this time in an outdoor cage (when it would rain and get very cold, you could see them shivering. When we brought this up to Seth, he told us that we should be using the mono (monkey) rags, something we had never heard of, and that he acted as if was common knowledge. We got to the box, and they were all moldy and destroyed as they hadn’t been used for months), and got very little attention or enrichment or care. Almost all of the food bowls, with the exception of some of the hanging baskets for the howlers and capuchins, were old peanut butter jars cut in half. While this is nice in that it is recycling, these makeshift food containers would be used for weeks on end without being changed out. They might be rinsed every once in a while, but that was it. Anyone that has worked at an accredited zoo or aquarium, or any animal care facility really, will tell you that it is best to use metal, as plastic fosters bacteria and is not as sanitary. But, again, this was the cheapest thing and instead of cutting costs by, say, not going on as many surfing trips, the animals got the brunt end of it. The human side of things was just as bad. A number of the interns received emails with a large number of swears and name-calling, despite the fact that the original emails were very polite. I personally didn’t receive any of these, so I don’t feel comfortable posting any of the ones forwarded to me, but just reading them would make one think it was written by a pissed 17-year-old boy, not a 30-something-year-old-man that’s supposed to be your boss. Seth also made fun of the accent of one of the interns from Italy when she dared contradict him on something he was saying, a very juvenile response that was also not expected from someone who was supposed to be a superior. I’ve never worked in such an unprofessional environment. Being out near a “rainforest”, one can except a casual atmosphere. But definitely not a hostile one that made it very uncomfortable to work in. Seth and Jolie were largely absent, but things were actually worse when they actually came around (especially Seth…Jolie tended to stay away). Tensions rose, and no one felt comfortable asking questions or making suggestions, as the few of those that did were yelled at in almost no time, or cut off before they had even finished their sentence. The sexism that Seth demonstrated was also very surprising, as he always spoke so highly of his sister (mainly, I realize now, to try to exalt himself by association). The male interns were visibly treated differently, even if they acted the same as everyone else. It was a male intern that Seth and Jolie wanted to take surfing (without even offering it to anyone else), and that they decided to teach how to set up camera traps, despite the fact that there were interns that had been there longer, done more work, and expressed more interest in the project (not myself, but others that were very interested in that sort of thing and had actually chosen to come go to Alouatta because of the camera trap project they advertised). We were told that there would be professionals on site. Ailsa had her PhD, and Jess her masters, but that was about it. Even then, their areas of study weren’t rainforest ecology, and there were no primatologists around, as was purported in the advertisement. We were told during one of our meetings that this wasn’t a field school, and we could pay thousands of dollars to go to one to get taught if we wanted to (despite the fact that we were all paying $3,000 and we took tests that one of the managers and Seth made...some interns actually took out more loans for the program because of the steep cost, thinking it would be worth it). But really, we were just reading from books how to use GIS—something we didn’t need to travel to Panama (although I love Panama!) and spend thousands of dollars to do. They also lied in grants…one that they wrote was left lying around (how is still unclear. I think at some point they were trying to illustrate how great they were, but it backfired in this situation) stated that one of the managers was a professor of ecology. But she was neither a professor (she had just completed her masters’ program) or have a class to teach (we weren’t taught anything, unless you count reading papers on ethograms and their uses, which as the majority of us already studied animals, understood their importance). There was more, but seeing as it was over a year ago, I can’t say for sure what else it said, so I don’t want to say anything that might be false. The best part of the program was, without a doubt, the monkeys (some of which I recently heard passed away, all within a few days of each other) and Pablo and Ofelia, the two Panamanian workers. Seth and Jolie claimed to love them, but Ofelia would be left waiting on the roadside for her ride to the sanctuary (the driveway was very long—about 30 minutes driving—and very hilly, and Ofelia was an elderly woman) sometimes for several days (obviously she would go home at night) because she wasn’t told that she wouldn’t be needed for work and that nobody was going to pick her up. I cried while leaving Ofelia because she was such a wonderful person that really cared about us. Pablo was also great, and was always willing to do extra to help us out. I wonder of the sustainability of this project run entirely by Americans, as I really feel like more heavily involving the local people would be the better course of action. Especially because Ofelia was much better with the monkeys, and much more loved by the monkeys, than either Seth or Jolie, who would get uncomfortable when we mentioned Ofelia’s connection with the monkeys. Submitted from David, Panama on 8/18/2016.
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