Tamao Mountain (Cambodia), 29/03/2009. A young gaur recently travelled from France to Cambodia and now resides in the Tamao Zoo. ©Vandy Rattana The Phnom Tamao Zoo, located slightly more than 25 miles to the Southeast of Phnom Penh, received late March a new resident: a gaur, sent from France on a Boeing 747. There are allegedly 200 animals of this wild cattle species left on the Cambodian territory and on a global scale, numbers are said to go between 15,000 and 20,000 animals, but those figures are distorted by the fact that 90% of those living in India are domesticated. “Gaurs are the largest bovines and paradoxically, the least studied”, Norin Chai regrets. He is the founder and president of Yaboumba, a French association working on the study and conservation of wild fauna. The Franco-Khmer doctor, who also holds a PhD in Science, is a veterinary doctor and researcher at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris and had the idea of this conservation programme with the goal of leading the first rigorous study on the genetics of gaurs. A pioneering genetics study about gaurs
By taking an interest in the genetic taxonomy of gaurs, Norin Chai is innovating. Indeed, DNA sequencing will reveal which species are genetically close to each other, and even to uncover “genetic nodes”, i.e. the division of a single species into two species at a certain point in its evolution. The menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes, France’s main botanical garden, shelters gaurs from the Berlin zoo which allegedly come from India originally. However, after a close look at the question, the gaur enthusiast – who arrived in France at the age of 4 with his teddy bear called “Yaboumba”, to whom he promised that “when he grows up”, he would save him and his buddies – discovered that those animals are more likely to come from Southeast Asia, and particularly from his native country, Cambodia.
“Much to our amazement, we realised that there was a great similarity between gaurs from the menagerie and those in Cambodia”, says Norin Chai, who accompanied the gaur in its long journey to Phnom Penh. Thus the idea sprung up: introducing in Cambodia a gaur from the French menagerie to provide some young blood to Cambodian gaurs, and then collect the sperm of the animal and freeze it by elaborating artificial insemination straws which would then be sent over to France. This way, we officialise a programme for the international breeding of gaurs by including Cambodia where gaurs from a strain genetically compatible with the Cambodian natural milieu will be reintroduced.”
By maintaining the animal ex situ, in this case zoological parks, risks of inbreeding are high when, as pointed out by Norin Chai, the goal of conservation itself is to strengthen wild populations, i.e. “in situ”. Cambodia lends itself perfectly to this experiment as despite everything, it still offers many preserved forests. The main reason why the animal catches the eye of Norin Chai, who studied at the Maisons-Alfort Veterinary School (France) and started out as director of the 114,000ha of the Manda National Park in Southern Chad, is because gaurs are one of the rare “mega-herbivores” – or an animal species that has kept its prehistoric form – and because their existence is now threatened in Southeast Asia. Norin Chai intends to send a French Veterinary School student to work on this project. The mission will be to take care and study the gaur recently sent to the Phnom Tamao zoo.
Gaurs: beyond the animal, symbols
Gaurs can attain the height of 20 hands, they are dark-coated and wear white “socks”. They are a sort of “flag-species, symbolising biodiversity” and “a pedagogical medium for conservation in general”, Norin Chai claims. In addition to that, the animal has a special connotation in Cambodia where it symbolises peace and serenity. Therefore, as illustrated by the 39 year-old Franco-Khmer Doctor, a pagoda in Longvek, some 30 miles away from Phnom Penh, is entirely dedicated to the animal. There is also the persistent legend of a gaur allegedly stolen from the Khmers by the Thai. This story shall not be told without a second voice, that of Norin Chai’s mother, Ung Daravichet Chai, who manages the Asia section of Yaboumba, opened in 2004 and registered with the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture.
To sum up the legend by allowing many shortcuts, this is the story of a woman who gives birth to a son (Preah Keo) and a calf (Preah Kor). The village, upon seeing this much incongruous dual birth, evicts the family, thinking it is a malediction. Many episodes later, the Thai King, who has his eye on the Khmer territory, offers the Khmer monarch to gamble his lands in animal fights. The calf, which had since then become a robust cow, offers to turn into a rooster to represent the Khmer side, and wins the fight. But the Thai King finds out about the hoax and also hears that this cow has in itself the whole knowledge of Cambodia. He covets the animal and during the third round, sends a mechanical animal to fight against it, an invincible animal bound to dominate over the cow. The victorious Thai King takes the cow to his country but after waiting for so long to return to its country, the cow turns into a statue. “A Khmer prediction says that the day when this cow returns to Cambodia, peace will return too! The gaur that we brought back to Cambodia is that very cow! And the symbol of it is even stronger since the animal was originally due to go through Vietnam, but finally passed through Thailand due to technical reasons...”, Ung Daravichet points out, now reassured and feeling peaceful about the future of her country.
Yaboumba : serving the ecological and social cause...
Beyond this operation, the core goal of the Yaboumba Association is to create an impact on the landscape on a permanent basis. This is why the association tops up its projects with micro conservation projects which the local population would directly benefit from. Here, the restoration of a pagoda, or there, the publishing of books with Khmer tales for children, or even buying a cow for a school in Udong to offer students the possibility to approach the living world practically. The operative word of the association is multidisciplinarity”, the veterinary doctor says with determination. He has been lovingly looking after the French Jardin des Plantes for ten years now.
The concepts presented on the website of Yaboumba, named after Norin Chai’s teddy bear, bear no ambiguity: “Too often, we see the waste that international Conservation projects can represent when they are led from a distance or literally coated with dollars without any real preoccupation about true on-the-ground issues. […] Keeping a cultural identity which favours a successful dialogue between cultures is essential in sustainable projects. Moreover, before “conserving”, the point is to talk first and work on the interests protagonists have in common, like cultures, traditions, religions... After that, a solid approach can be followed for the conservation and rational management of natural resources.”
... throughout the world
The Yaboumba Association expanded very quickly and now has branches in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Bangladesh as well as a branch office in Africa and one in Asia. The vet, who is the grandson of Ministers from the Lon Nol regime, never stops with initiatives. He launched a quarterly magazine for post-university training: the “Pratique des animaux sauvages et exotiques” (Practice of wild and exotic animals), is the first and only veterinary magazine in French specialised in new pets and other exotic animals. As a side activity, Norin Chai organises congresses and eco-tourism trips for experts in his congregation of veterinary doctors, which will allow him to finance his research, among other things. Norin Chai definitely kept his promise and was loyal to his childhood teddy bear...
The scientific aspect of the project explained on the Yaboumba website"Three species of wild cattle have been described in Cambodia: bantengs (Bos javanicus), gaurs (Bos frontalis) and koupreys (Bos sauveli), the latter being the country’s national emblem. A recent molecular study concluded that those three species had diverged since the end of the Pliocene epoch, around 2.6 +- 0.5 million years BC. Unfortunately, the data available does not tell whether koupreys are genetically closer to bantengs or gaurs, or if the species is divergent from the two others. Other studies revealed cases of hybridisation between domestic and wild bovines, and ongoing studies leave one to think that koupreys may have taken part in the domestication of bovines in Cambodia. We have already initiated a study based on osteological specimens kept among the collections of the French National Museum of Natural History and living animals kept in the Menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes, and also tissue we recently took samples of in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The first analyses show that wild and domestic populations in Cambodia are very heterogeneous from a morphological point of view, but also when it comes to molecules. In order to understand gene flux between wild and domestic cattle, it now seems necessary to sample more specimens in Cambodia.” Source: Yaboumba Association |
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