Dear Friends and Supporters,

Dear friends and supporters, 

We are excited to share with you many great news happened in August: our 4th Birthday party, rescue of two Leopard cats and 25 pangolins, release of 63 pangolins back to their natural home, new vet clinic, working with a zoo nutritionist on animal diet, and more. Keep reading till the end to know details!

We are now four years old.

We were delightful to celebrate our Fourth Anniversary of Save Vietnam Wildlife, 22 July (2014 - 2018). Four year might not be that long to some people but we feel like it’s such a long journey we have gone through from a difficult time at the beginning with just one person till now we are over 40 people. Moreover, we have thousands of donors, supporters from all over the world who cares so much about wildlife and conservation work to save these beautiful creatures from extinction, which inspires us to carry on our work day by day. We hope another year will be filled with lots of happy news and less of sadness. Stay with us!

25 Sunda pangolins and 4 leopard cats were rescued.

Within a month, SVW called Police from Hung Yen province to come to rescue 118 pangolins which were confiscated from illegal trade. After being accepted by Police, our Rapid Response Team went straight to the site look after for those pangolins. Unfortunately, 95 pangolins died before we arrived, which our team only was only able to save the 23 alive pangolins. Those pangolins were placed in our quarantine facilities and under intensive care by our vets and keepers every day. They are recovering from dehydration and exhaustion. Hopefully, they will be ready for the next release trip. Furthermore, 4 leopard cats and two pangolins from the police of Thanh Hoa province and Thuy Nguyen city - Hai Phong province. They were also transferred to our rescue centre at Cuc Phuong National Park.

July was still a “home-sweet-home” month for the pangolins.

After passing over thousand kilometers away from our rescue centre, 63 Java pangolins returned home safely. This time, 6 pangolins have been monitoring by radio-tracking which 4 of them were attached GPS transmitters. Our field researchers have stayed at the released sites to follow up with pangolins every days in the first one month, then we will check the pangolins every weeks. The camera traps were also set up at the places where pangolins sleeps to collect more information about those animals. More update information will come soon.

The brand new vet clinic is completed!

Our brand new vet clinic has been opened and effectively used since early August. There is one large procedure room where the vet conduct most of treatment work, one laboratory plus office where they can collect blood test, samples for research purpose and do other document work; one small carnivore room and one pangolin room to keep sick animal for tracking their recovery process. 

We are still slowly installing some more equipment to upgrade the facilitties to be able to do more serious medical cases.If you have spare medical facitilies, machines that no longer use to donate, please let us know at info@svw.vn. Thank you so much!

We would like to send our deepest thank to WTG organization for support us this beautiful vet clinic!

Working with zoo nutritionist to improve our animal diet.

SVW has welcome animal nutritionist Michelle Shaw from the Taronga Zoo to work with our team to review current animal diet and suggest to improve it. Michelle has presented a presentation to our staff about the important of diet for captive animals and the research need to improve understand nutrition requirement. Michelle is also working with our keepers and veterinarians to formulate a special diet to meet all the nutritional needs of the pangolins  and carnivores in our center. Currently, the captive team is running food trials with appointed individuals to find out if the sample diet is effective.

A social research is implementing in the busiest city of Vietnam.

University of Oxford, Save Vietnam’s Wildlife and other partners are collaborated to implement project: Exploring the Effective Use of Celebrities in Wildlife Demand Reduction: Changing Perceptions of Pangolins in Vietnam. Post-doc researcher Daniel Challendar and the PhD student Alegria Olmedo from Oxford University and SVW staff are carrying out a social research to increase the understanding about knowledge and demand of pangolins from local residents in Ho Chi Minh city as well as the to understand about online pangolin trade. A launching event was organised in Hanoi with Vietnamese government and NGOs to share and comment for the project.

Continue with systematic camera-trapping.

It is great result from our last setting 128 camera traps in collaboration with Leibniz-IZW, Berlin and Pu Mat National Park. Sunda Pangolins were recorded on at least 6/64 camera-trap stations and one of these animals was a released pangolins (confirmed by the presence of a VHF tag). One of the major conundrums will be how we identify released animals; we are going to start trailing marking techniques in captivity. Small carnivores recorded included ferret badger , Stripe-backed Weasel , Yellow-bellied Weasel , Greater Hog Badger , Yellow-throated Marten, Crab-eating Mongoose, Common Palm Civet, Masked Palm Civet and Spotted Linsang. Another great news is that Asiatic Black Bear was also recorded by the camera trap here.
SVW also collaborate with Leibniz-IZW, Vinh University and Pu Mat national park to setup camera trap entire Pu Mat National Park. It will provide the great base-line of wildlife population in the park. More update will come soon.

What we found in the forest.

Anti-poaching team and 3 rangers of Pu Mat National Park patrolled 153 km by foot in the forests in July 2018. They arrested 12 poachers and confiscated 2 guns & 179 traps and destroyed 22 camps in the forests, which are some highlight of their work. Check their summary report of July.

Team member needed!

As we grow, more new colleagues and job opportunity!

Yes, we need you, you and you. SVW family is steadily growing and we have many positions need to be filled. If you have a big heart to care for the animal and ecosystem, have passion in “making the world a better place”, adapt to the simple jungle life, be good team-player and have sort of skills that can contribute to our organization, please give us a shout!

This time, the work requires people who can speak Vietnamese as a mother tongue. More information can be found here.

Field Researcher

Education Outreach Officer

Designer

Manager Assistant

Short-term Research Assistant

Thank you!

For reading our newsletter and for supporting us
on every single project, rescue or release.

See you next month!