Above: Dateline investigates the illegal wildlife trade in Sulawesi and how it’s wiping out rare and endemic species. Watch the full story On Demand.
I’ve never filmed in a place where animals and humans live more closely or collide more often and easily than Sulawesi, Indonesia.
We were filming with butterfly traders in the forests of Bantimurung and between takes I turned around to find two unlikely faces staring back at us. It was a surreal moment, so I snapped a couple photos on my phone.
The images are striking and hauntingly beautiful - as much for their innocence as their dreamlike quality. But beneath the little girl’s stare and colourful t-shirt, hides the catastrophic impact we as humans are having on the animal world.
A local girl pictured with her pet monkey, a Tonkean macaque, in the forests of Bantimurung National Park, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Source: Dateline
Overnight, the a landmark report that says one million species face extinction because of human influence. To know what this looks like, you only need ten days on the ground in Sulawesi exploring the wildlife trade.
This remote jungle island is a little documented frontline of a global annihilation that is spiralling out of control, already labelled the 'sixth mass extinction'. From the smallest butterfly up to its most prized mammal (the wonderfully human-like yaki or crested black macaque), Sulawesi’s unique animals are collected and traded to be sold as pets, or butchered and burned to be sold as food.
The yaki is now critically endangered.
It’s wild, at times beautiful and endlessly confronting stuff. Mostly because those living at the centre of this trade, the ones helping to fuel it, have no idea they are doing anything wrong. Nor of the ecological collapse unfolding around them.
SBS Dateline reporter Calliste Weitenberg pictured with a rescued reticulated python, sold locally in Sulawesi’s bush meat trade. Source: Dateline
According to the little girl’s family, they adopted the baby monkey after its parents abandoned it. “If we don’t look after it, it will die,” her mum told me – as she kindly fed the skinny little thing with big eyes a banana.
But the more we spoke, the grim reason why the baby monkey had been orphaned became clear. Its family had clashed with the little girl’s uncle – who’d encroached on their forest home as he cleared the land on his own home, to farm.
What it symbolises makes me incredibly sad. Both families are simply trying to survive. It’s just there’s a few thousand of one and billions of the other. So it’s clear who’s going to win out. Yet with every win, we’re undermining the natural resources upon which our very own survival depends.
The little girl’s monkey, it turns out, is a Tonkean black macaque – endemic to Central Sulawesi, it’s threatened by habitat loss and listed as vulnerable, meaning its population is decreasing.
Like many activists around the world, like the #extinctionrebellion movement forcing global cities to a standstill, like the wildlife rescue teams in Sulawesi trying to rehabilitate the hundreds of traded animals in their care, like Greta Thunberg, I want to force every set of Australian eyes to see the catastrophe, the loss, the prophetic absurdity of our impact.
A local trader shows rthe day’s catch to be sold as bush meat. Local bats endemic to the island are already disappearing from parts of North Sulawesi. Source: Dateline
I want you to watch this film. I want you to be aware and I want you to share.
This isn’t just Sulawesi’s problem. Australia now has the fourth-highest level of animal species extinction in the world – according to the .
Sulawesi’s ignorance – is our ignorance too. So we all have to make a change.
Before leaving the little girl and her monkey, I asked her mother what she planned to do with it. She said she’d keep it until wildlife authorities could come to collect it.
But someone had already offered to buy it. “500,000IDR can buy a new mobile phone!” she said with a grin.
I don’t know what happened to the little creature in my photos. But I’m trying to believe he’ll survive.
