Wildlife on the MOVE
With growing development, our society is increasingly disconnected from the natural world, leading people to lose interest in protecting nature and the animal wildlife it inhabits. This issue is especially of concern for fast-growing countries like Vietnam, which harbours one of the few remaining biodiversity hotspots on earth. With the ‘Wildlife On The Move’ project in Vietnam, we are bringing wildlife closer to people in an interactive, fun, harmless, and creative way.
Similar to pop-up events, the ‘Wildlife on the Move’ events can easily and quickly be set up and taken apart the same day, allowing to tour around larger geographic areas in various communities. These communities include schools, universities, galleries, cafés, festivals, businesses, and even more remote rural communities in proximity of a threatened species requiring urgent protection.
We believe that ‘planting seeds’ in different communities about the importance of conserving wild animals will lead to cascading effects from the individual level, to local projects, to networks and alliances, and eventually to movements that provide a real collective possibility for change.
Primates on the Move
The launching of the ‘Wildlife On The Move‘-project was initially inspired by ‘bringing’ primates closer to people through a primate photo exhibition. There are a stunning 24 different species of primates living in the forests of the country, with some of the most beautiful and spectacular monkeys in the world. Unfortunately, the lack of care to preserve primates and their homes, has driven most of the primate species in only a few decades at the edge of extinction, with some species being only represented by only 60 individuals remaining in the wild.
The urgent need to raise awareness about the importance of protecting primates in Vietnam and wildlife in general has led us to put together the exhibition ‘Primates of Vietnam: Living on the Edge’
The success of the exhibition encourages us to start touring around the exhibition in different locations of Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam, including galleries, festivals, schools, and universities. Side events during the exhibition, like guided explanations, games, and artwork, further increased the people’s engagement. We are grateful to have received support along the way from a variety of organizations, including Global Conservation Force, Wildhand, and Endangered Primate Rescue Center.
Rhinos on the Move
The primate exhibition attracted a large and diverse audience, which encouraged us to scale up by setting up new exhibitions as well as educative material for different groups of threatened animal species, including rhinos. The term ‘rhinoceros‘ means ‘nose horn‘ which pertains to the majestic horns growing from the rhino’s snout. But, it is that same horn, that has been a real curse for these animals, leading all rhino species to the brink of extinction.
Rhino horn is very desirable amongst the wealthy classes of Viet Nam, where it is considered a symbol of power and wealth. This cultural importance is supported by an underlying false belief in health benefits, in the form of traditional medicine. Today, Vietnam has grown as one of the world’s largest consumers of rhino horn in the world. This has not only led to a disastrous collapse of all rhino populations across the world but also to deadly wars between poachers against rangers desperately fighting to protect these vulnerable animals.
In Vietnam, the very last existing rhino in the wild was recently shot in 2010 by poachers to fuel the demand for horn. It is with the hope that a similar sad story does not repeat itself across the world for other rhino populations, we teamed up with other civil societies (Wilderness Foundation Africa, Wildhand) to put together and showcase the photo-exhibition: ‘BORN WITH HORNS’.
Wildwarriors
Our increasing experience of moving around with the wildlife educative material allowed us to start events outside Hanoi, especially in schools in the proximity of vulnerable wildlife hotspots, such as the local primary schools near Ba Vi National Park, Vietnam. ‘Wildlife on the Move’ project in schools has been a very cost-effective way to convert the kids into proud WILDWARRIORS sensitive to the importance of protecting the wildlife of their country.
We initiated in some schools regular visits to the same kids to reinforce their environmental awareness in the long run and take the time to introduce them to the incredible animal biodiversity in Vietnam. Eventually, the wild warriors were so enthusiastic to learn that we decided to reward them by taking them to animal wildlife rescue centers where they got to meet in real many of the endangered species.
”'In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.' Baba Dioum
