Hopefully they will go to the pet shop and confiscate the monkey. It will then probably end up at the zoo which isn't fantastic but it's better then being someone's pet.

Unfortunately enrolling a sanctuary in another country won't help you. They have no power to seize an animal, and even if they agree to take it once confiscated, it takes almost a year to get all the necessary paperwork, blood tests and permissions to move a primate. It's a joke that they can illegally smuggle them from one country to another but if you go down the official route it takes forever.

You also can't get an export permit for primates unless you can prove where they came from. 99% of the time, if you get an animal from a pet shop, it won't have the right papers to send it to another country. This also applies to all the birds that are bought too. As the CITES office knows QAWS well, we were able to get special dispensation to send her to a sanctuary but it's not something that can be done easily.

We have never filled out as much paperwork for anything before! Going to the UK meant that there was all the paperwork for quarantine as well as having to gain CITES permission and trying to get a custom built primate transporter sent over from the UK for her to travel in. They can't just go in a dog crate - they have to be metal primate travel crates!

Hopefully the little one will be moved before tomorrow - if it's not then we'll pay a visit to the CITES office to give them a little push :D

www.qaws.org