BY Tan Shi Min

The watch showed 11.00pm. However, it was a sleepless night for Dr. Leonora. She was supposed to pick up her friend at the airport when she got the call from the wildlife officer. Upon answering the call, Dr. Leonora quickly rushed to the airport to pick up her friend, and then to the office to grab her emergency field bag. Together with another wildlife officer, Dr. Leonora and her friend embarked on a 2-hour journey to this quaint little town in Jempol, Negeri Sembilan for a special mission to rescue a very exotic creature.

“It all started with a complaint by the ‘orang-orang kampung’ a month before that. A call was made to our wildlife department district office. They were complaining that there was this tapir that kept going into their ‘kebun’ or even their housing area. It is quite rare for tapirs to go into human-dominated areas, unless they’re really desperate for food or
already not physically healthy,” said Dr. Leonora, a veterinary officer who worked on call that week. It was her first ever wildlife rescue mission after being enrolled in the team.

However, catching the tapir was certainly not an easy task.

“We started setting up this box trap to catch the fella, and we waited for a month before we finally got her. Because tapirs are largely nocturnal, they only come out at night. We managed to get her in the box trap at around 8pm that night,” explained Dr. Leonora.

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Upon seeing the tapir in the box at 1.00am, Dr. Leonora started treating the tapir by first examining the tapir. It was a pitch-black night, and Dr. Leonora had no choice but to treat the tapir with the help from the only source of light they had at that time - a headlamp. Seeing that the tapir might survive a sedation, Dr. Leonora tranquilised the tapir before
doing blood sampling, as well as basic wound and supportive treatment. A microchip was also implanted into the tapir to ease the tracking of the tapir. It was not until 4 o’clock in the morning that Dr. Leonora completed her tasks in the dark, with her friend being her assistant.

When the sun rose again, Dr. Leonora could finally examine the condition of the tapir properly. It was an old female tapir, with one eye blind. The blind eye appeared as a suspected trauma caused by a physical attack, as there were scars on the cornea of that injured eye. Dr. Leonora had to cover her other eye so that she wouldn’t be easily stimulated to wake up during the sedation. There were also a lot of wounds and scratches all over her back. It seemed the poor tapir had met with an opportunistic attack from a Melanistic leopard or a medium-sized wild feline which took advantage of the tapir’s already weak condition. Her injuries looked quite severe and required immediate attention. Dr. Leonora had to spend a week there to observe and treat the tapir while the wildlife officer sent her exhausted friend back to her house.

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Since the tapir could not be released back into the wild due to her condition, Dr. Leonora and the wildlife officer decided to translocate the tapir to Sungai Dusun Wildlife Conservation Center located at the border of Selangor-Perak, which was about 230 kilometers away from Jempol. “The translocation process was also another adventure,” recalled Dr. Leonora. The tapir weighed almost 300 kilograms, and the box carrying her weighed more than 100 kilograms. It took four stout and well-built men to carry the box into the truck.

 

Sadly, the tapir only managed to survive for a month. There were too many issues going on with her. She had chronic bacterial infections that became resistant to the treatments. It was very frustrating because no matter how hard Dr. Leonora and the wildlife officer tried, the tapir’s condition still went downhill. “She was losing her body weight, and was getting weaker day by day despite eating well, which was very odd! Even until the very last day, she was still eating. Maybe she knew she wouldn't live long, so she ate as much as she wanted before her departure to the other world. It’s kind of like a survival instinct. After this case, I noticed a few more cases like this in other wild animals right before their death,” explained Dr. Leonora.

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When being asked about the tapir’s possible place of origin, Dr. Leonora suspected the tapir might come from a nearby forest in Bera, located near the border of Pahang-Negeri Sembilan. There had been reported cases of illegal logging in the forest in the recent years. “My guess is, if her habitat was not disturbed, I don't think the fella would've entered into human areas. In addition to this case, there were other cases where the tapirs died after being hit by a car, a bike or a truck. They were quite malnourished because they couldn't find food anymore in their natural habitat. There was one hit-by-‘rempit’ case that we got, which involved a juvenile male tapir. It was very disheartening because male tapirs are the ones we rely on to breed and increase the tapir population since their roaming range is wider than the female tapirs. When there are less male tapirs left to move around to meet the female tapirs, it will certainly decrease the chances of them breeding the next generation.”

To date, there are possibly less than 1,300 tapirs which are still surviving in Malaysia, with about 14 tapirs being taken care of in the Sungai Dusun Wildlife Conservation Center. In addition to tapirs, there are also other endangered species in Malaysia. There are only less than 200 Malayan tigers left in Malaysia. Last year, we also lost Iman, the last
Sumatran Rhinoceros in Malaysia, despite persistent attempts by Dr Zainal Zahari Zainuddin, another leading wildlife veterinarian in Malaysia to save her. That’s the sad reality of wildlife preservation in Malaysia. Until we do something to save their natural habitats, we might lose our precious tapirs and Malayan tigers as well.

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Dr. Leonora is a veterinary officer based in Department of Veterinary Services Malaysia