ENDANGERED: Fine Art & Photography Contest 2022 Submission

Ayla. I am not a pet. I am a bushmeat orphan. Ayla was a tiny female orphaned vervet monkey I helped care for at the Vervet Monkey Foundation (VMF) in South Africa. Native vervets and chacma baboons are highly intelligent and enterprising and suffer greatly in the collision of human encroachment. They are often considered pests by farmers and killed or injured by a brutal array of methods. November through February is vervet baby season. The greatest influx of infant orphans arrive at the VMF after the holidays (orphans rescued by individuals are kept as pets or as novelty through the holidays then turned over to the sanctuary). Infant vervet monkeys have a heart-wrenching cry for their mothers more painful to hear when one knows they are orphans whose mothers will never come. Kudos to the VMF for their brilliant foster mum program - pairing orphaned baby vervets with female adult vervets at the sanctuary who fiercely and fully accept the babies as their own.