Will you part in our raffle and help us provide a portable health check kit for our partners at West African Primate Conservation Action in Ghana?

Buy your tickets here: http://bit.ly/3eSID2h

It's £2 for 1 TICKET, or £10 FOR 6 TICKETS. 

We will draw the winning ticket live on Facebook on Friday 9th April 2021. 

Our lovely supporter, Angela Parker, has generously donated her painting of 18 year old mangabey, Bella, for us to raffle. The funds raised will provide a portable health check kit to support vets working in primate conservation in Ghana. It will be used to help monitor the health of the white-naped mangabeys in their care. As well as some basic anaesthetic equipment, it will include instruments for checking the animals' eyes, ears and mouths in order to identify any problems. It will also contain supplies for collecting essential samples for health screening. 

WAPCA is doing amazing work to save the Endangered white-naped mangabey and WVI is helping them look at the feasibility of releasing captive-bred mangabeys into community managed and protected forest, to boost the remaining wild population.

WAPCA Programme Manager, Andrea Dempsey, has told us a little bit about Bella, the subject of Angela's portrait:

"Bella was born at Barcelona Zoo on the 6th August, 2002. She will be 19 years old this year. She was transferred on a breeding recommendation to ZSL London Zoo on the 14th of December 2006, where she would create a new breeding group with another female, Leonie, from Germany and a male, Lucky, from Ghana. This would be the first time ZSL held this species at the zoo. Bella gave birth in May 2008 to her first offspring, Luca.She went on to have three more offspring; Paddy, Ziggy and Hope. Luca is in Rome, Paddy is at Flamingo Land in the UK, Hope is at Bioparc Valencia while Ziggy travelled all the way back to Ghana."

Bella has played an important role in the captive breeding programme, increasing the chances of her species' survival. By helping fund this portable kit for the vets in Ghana, you can help WAPCA take things a stage further as they put plans in place for the release of captive-bred mangabeys into the wild. 

Leading WVI's support to WAPCA is vet nurse Matthew Rendle. The health check kit he wants to provide will cost £350. It will be carried by local vets monitoring the health of captive white-naped mangabeys living at two ex-situ forest sites. As well as items like an otoscope and endotracheal tube, it will include things like blood sample tubes and a set of clear instructions on dosages in order to make sure anaesthesia is safe and effective.

The white-naped mangabey is an Afro-Eurasian monkey that was once found across Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso. Now classified as Endangered, the remaining populations have become very fragmented, with less than 600 animals left in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. There has been no recorded sighting in BurkinaFaso since 2005. Over the last 27 years, habitat destruction and hunting have meant that numbers have plummeted.

It's estimated that without concerted conservation action, Ghana's remaining white-naped mangabeys will disappear over the next 20 years. By taking part in the raffle you will be helping WAPCA make sure that doesn't happen.

As well as being an artist, Angela is a keen wildlife photographer, and her painting is based on an image she took of Bella at ZSL in 2017. We are immensely grateful to her for her very kind gesture.

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