Welcome to Chiang Mai
“Welcome to Chiang Mai”
Those were the warm words that always greeted me when I met Tony Smallwood after an absence from Chiang Mai. Tony was the inspiration behind my flying adventures, and my mentor. He taught many of us the value of animal conservation and how to combine our respective talents to help preserve the fragile existence of the animals on this planet.
The Gibbon Rehabilitation Project Chiang Mai (GRPC) – Tony Smallwood memorial project is the next significant chapter in the wonderful story of Gibbon Rehabilitation worldwide. He was one of the first volunteer who helped at the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation Thailand (WARF) and was a driving force in the Gibbon Rehabilitation project based in Phuket that has the most successful record for re-introducing Gibbons back into the wild worldwide.
The original Gibbon Rehabilitation Project in Phuket is located in a small area of national forest which after 20 years is running out of space.
Gibbons were once indigenous to Chiang Mai, but as all too often, they were hunted or encroached out of existence and the only memory left is the grandparent generation’s memories of the early morning song of the gibbons.
Sadly, Tony passed away in 2013, but fortunately, not before he, and the other founders of WARF had the foresight and vision to plan extending the rehabilitation project by locating suitable forest areas in Chiang Mai in which to reestablish a Gibbon community once again.
The Tony Smallwood memorial project aims to establish several new locations in the Chiang Mai forest area, using local communities to take care of the Gibbons. Since the Phuket Centre has a proven track record of rehabilitating Gibbons to the point of release; established Gibbon family pairs preferably with an infant will be chosen for transportation from Phuket to Chiang Mai so that they can be acclimatised and prepared for release into the wild. It takes five years, yes five years to rehabilitate a Gibbon for release back into the wild. That is five years of dedicated care by an inspirational team of people, many volunteers, to achieve this wonderful result.
We are reaching out to you, to help support us in the noble task. It costs approximately USD 1,500 per Gibbon to relocate it from Phuket to Chiang Mai, and then nurture it back into the wild.
Many thanks – Eduardo and the WARF team!
Trustee
“Not only help those cruel gibbons from illegal tourist attraction businesses and set them free, but we are also moving on fulfilling Thailand’ ecosystem with gibbons where they were poached to extinction in many forests.”
MEET THE TRUSTEE TEAM WHO MADE THIS PROJECT POSSIBLE
We strongly believe that Pang Champee, Chiang Mai, is the most suitable place to set as our second release site. Not only it ticked all of our forest criteria and community background check list, but also it was where Tony Smallwood always wanted us to made his retirement hometown alive with gibbon song once again.
After all those hard works, we are so happy about the first baby gibbon who was born in the wild to a pair of gibbons we released earlier, so we name this little baby, ” Khun Tony ” in memorial of our beloved friend, Tony Smallwood.