Cruel and unusual: Slowing down a Slow Loris in Phuket

We didn't know what it was, but as the days roll on the guilt builds. The more I know, the less proud I am. I feel like I went from an animal rights, "PETA certified", servant of the wild to a 6-year-old boy with a magnifying glass -- but only in reflection.

It was dark and Jackie riding pillion as we ground up the the dark hill near our house. There, flat in the middle of the back road and sprawled out as if it had been crushed, was a little swath of fur.

Interested, keen and animal roadkill savvy, I pulled over to have me an investigation: not roadkill -- roadliving. The small creature turned its flat face up to us. One armed was stretched out. There was something desperate and compelling about its prostrated posture, about its sad, wet noise and seemingly teary eyes. It looked sick. It hardly seemed to have the energy to move once caught in our light. Like I said we didn't know what it was. Not a monkey. A lemur? A marmoset?

I wasn't sure what to do. It didn't seem injured just tired, exhausted -- slow. A man (Simon) and woman drove by us on the main road. I waved them down. It was instinctual, because I recognized them. Though just four hours earlier I had seen them and thought "God, I hate those two." It was nothing personal of course, but one was a farang and the other a Thai woman; they both had bright-red dyed hair and his was just a little ratty top-ponytail. They looked ridiculous. Early that day wasn't the first time I had seen them -- that hair was hard to miss.

They stopped and came down. They also thought it was sick. Simone, who we later found out was vegetarian after someone joked about eating the animal, offered to take it home and then to the veterinarian the next day. He and his girlfriend were incredibly nice, it looks like my snap judgment has started to fail me, might explain some poker issues.

We all crouched around the little animal, who kept turning its face down, hiding, but not running -- clearly a sick creature or maybe just a sad lost creature. (It turns out the Slow Loris is native to Phuket and the slowest mammal in the world.) A pickup truck started to rumble up the hill, and already another moped had stopped. The woman on the moped asked if the animal was a dog. No dog, no monkey, it's a . . .  well, none of us knew.

Simon tried to pick it up and get it out of the road. It then somehow managed to bite his girlfriend. She screamed and threw her purse, which the creature had managed to end up on. It landed on the seat of Simon's motorbike, and there it lay.

The truck driver, catching onto the obvious commotion, pulled over to have a look.

The poor animal, had the air of a mother who had lost its child as we tried to figure out how to get it into the purse, so Simon could take it to the vet. The Thai man in the truck, knew what it was, though he didn't know the English name, leaving us all with a set of sounds with a very clear meaning . . . whatever we had in front of us, but no context to put it in.

In one of the many attempts to get the loris in the bag the man was bitten. He squeezed his finger and a drop of blood appeared.

In our attempts to move the loris, which was really very chilled out and kept tucking its head down, trying to get away from the lights and commotion, it fell to the ground with a horrible thud.

Shortly after, I can't remember exactly how, it ended up wrapped around the clutch of the motorcycle. The Thai man firmly pulled and wiggled and tried his best to pull the loris free, but it refused to budge -- its sudden strength and obvious "fuck off" attitude didn't ring bells for anyone. We had established it was "sick" and were working solely from that premise -- no time to re-evaluate

Finally, by prying the the poor loris's fingers off one by one they were able to sack the little animal. Now they could take it to the hospital in the morning.





















I didn't figure out what that it was a slow loris until I did a little Google research the next day.

I didn't know that it was supposedly the slowest moving mammal in the world until Chris mentioned it at lunch.

I didn't realize that my will, no matter its intentions, actually bought about the torture of a tiny, wild, benign and endangered creature.

Simone and his girlfriend will no-doubt be spotted again at some point. I look forward to following up on the happenings of our poor loris and perhaps apologizing to them also -- it had to be very embarrassing to take a slow loris to a vet and ask him why it had seemed so sluggish and unhappy in the bright lights and cacophony of curiosity we had inundated it with.