It was August 2024 in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. A few pieces of sugar cane lay scattered on the scorching asphalt, and a section of wire mesh – the remnants of a makeshift trap for wild monkeys. A few days earlier Mansa Daby, founder of NGO Monkey Massacre in Mauritius, which campaigns against the breeding of long-tailed macaques on the island, had visited the site to confirm the presence of a trap. Now she was back, after a tip-off that it had been destroyed. ‘Last time I was here, it was intact and in working order,’ she told me. ‘This kind of destructive reaction from local residents is a bit extreme, but it’s happened a couple of times. Some people have had enough of these traps, which can be just a few metres from their garden.’

Long-tailed macaques have been bred in Mauritius since the 1980s, but since 2020 business has taken off. Until then, China was the world’s largest exporter of laboratory monkeys, which are vital to the study of viruses and infectious diseases; in 2018 it shipped some 30,000, mostly to the US. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, Beijing decided to reserve non-human primates (NHPs) for its own pharmaceutical industry. By 2023 Mauritius was the world’s top exporter, selling 15,097 in 2023, ahead of Cambodia (13,305) and Vietnam (3,405). And because the supply of captive-bred animals was not enough to satisfy demand, around 2,500 of the monkeys Mauritius sent to labs that year were wild-caught – even though the long-tailed macaque is on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list of threatened species.

Six Mauritian companies make over 4bn rupees ($87m) a year between them from macaque exports, though this is little compared to the island’s GDP of around 700bn rupees ($15bn), much of which comes from tourism, and even more from financial services (Mauritius is regarded as a tax haven).

The monkey trade goes against the religion of many of Mauritius’s 1.3 million people. (…)

Full article: 1 609 words.

(1) ‘Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 5-16 June 1972’, United Nations, New York, 1973.

(2) ‘The State of the Environment 1972-1982’, UNEP, Nairobi, 1982.

(4) Aurélien Bernier, ‘Should we scrap Kyoto?’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, December 2007.

(5) ‘The Founex report on development and environment’, Founex, Switzerland, 4-12 June 1971.