The Superior Species

We visit the Cochauasi Animal Sanctuary, just outside of the city it is well worth the effort.

We meet a beautiful green grey tortoise, the size of a medium sized dog, whose owner brought him from his natural Amazonian habitat, then tired of him and literally threw him out with the trash, on the streets of Cusco, far from home. He shares a patch of shade on the grass companiably with a small Andean deer, who looks out at is with a trusting expression rather undeserved given that she has been a victim of unlawful poaching.

Our human host, infectious in his enthusiasm for the animals, though with none of the sense of patronisation so often exhibited by well meaning humans, introduced us next to a selection of llamas, long and short haired, alpacas, young and old, and the elegant vicuñas. The vicuñas, as we already know, fall prey to human greed despite laws to protect them, because their coats are so fine and so sift and fetch an eye watering price in fashionable corners of the world, such as Italy, but when I ask what caused the llamas and alpacas to be here he looks confused.

"They just are." He says. "We like them."

It was a stupid question really. In Peru everybody has a llama.

I am invited, if I like, to feed and pet the little  llama family, consisting of mother and two babies. I do like.

"Hola" I say chattily to the llamas, gently stroking their woolly necks and offering my grasses, "how are you?"our guide looks at me strangely.

"They don't speak" he says.

Having learned this curious fact about the silent nature of llamas, we move on. I gasp to note three huge and beautifully, vibrantly coloured parrots, sitting regarding me solemnly from their perch on a wooden frame. They are, to my delight, not chained, caged or otherwise constrained.

"The humans who caught them cut their wings," our guide explains. "They brought them from the jungle. They wanted the feathers."

I watch the stunning creatures sadly. What a way to be treated. I instantly change my mind about the dramatic feather earrings I have been seeing around town, and rather liking. I am not wearing something for which an animal had been plucked and mutilated. The parrots are much more beautiful as whole birds than any human manipulation of their plumage.

We meet a pair of baby Andean cats, orphaned when their mother was killed, and prowling about their cage like miniature leopards. We are careful not to put our fingers through the bars as there is nothing domestic about these cats. Nor should there be. Once they are old enough to look after themselves they will be reintroduced to the wilds that they came from.

There is a family of Pumas, the size of wild dogs, watching us alertly from their spacious enclosure. They were rescued, if you can believe it, from a discothèque, where they were being made to perform tricks. It is too late for the adults but the baby, born in the sanctuary, may be reintroduced to his natural habitat in time.

A discothèque. Performing tricks.

Humans, (there is no two ways about it), are idiots.

Of course the highlight of the sanctuary, apart from the good work it is doing to remedy the surprising depths of irresponsibility to which people are capable of dinking in relation to animals, are the Condors. These stunning and powerful birds are endangered, poached and poisoned by farmers who wrongly, think they are hunters who will kill their livestock (in fact Condors only eat meat which has already been killed by another predator, they are not themselves aggressors). Again, the adults may not ever return to the wild, but there is hope for the babies, barely smaller than the massive adults, but distinguishable by their brown colouring, rather than the distinctive black white and grey of their parents. It is so moving to be so close to these birds, who strut around without minding our presence. When they fly above our heads to land just behind us it is amazing to feel the power in those wings, but also saddening, because those wings are made not to flap but to glide, and at heights well beyond a couple of metres. I hope the babies at least might have a chance of a new life, soaring at dizzying altitudes over mountain ranges, and far from people who look at them and see only money.

This concludes our tour, but we spend some time watching the monkeys, trafficked as pets or cheap entertainment. The babies jump and squeak and chatter, while the larger monkeys move more slowly, one, a round faced, sloth like creature, snoozing his way around his new home, relieved perhaps, to be allowed to be an animal, without clothes, or tightropes or other trappings of the circus.

We leave with a sense of increased respect for the animal kingdom and of disgust for the human one.

Apart from the man and women who run the sanctuary, human kind slightly elevates itself in my eyes when we return to the doctors surgery to ask about my ears, which are still blocked and uncomfortable. We see a bright, efficient female doctor, who takes one look, declares that I simply need syringing, just as I had initially thought. I leave, able to hear and devoid of the increasing dizziness I had been suffering from the longer the situation continued, and half in live with that doctor. I will say nothing about the previous doctor, who had caused me to take ineffective, unnecessary and expensive antibiotics for a fictional 'ear infection'. Bygones.

At least no one is plucking out my feathers so they can wear them to their bosses cocktail party on Saturday.