ARCAS Part 3 (or) Kinkajou – I choose You!
October 10th, 2007
I am a cliché. Out of all the crawly-cutie-fuzzy-wuzzys I chose the softest and most adorable of all – I am in love with Kinkajou! I never even knew such an animal existed. You could say it is a sort of cross between a monkey and a bear, but it’s so much more. Much softer then any monkey that I have touched, and as for bears… Guess I should consider myself lucky never being touched by a bear yet.
the Kinkajou and I
This Kinkajou was brought to ARCAS by people that bought him from traffickers on the border of Guatemala and Mexico (if I remember correctly), and right now it is young enough to be handled, but soon it will reach sexual maturity and will become quite aggressive. In retrospect, this is actually for the better. This way his contact with grabby humans (such as myself) will be limited, and it will remain wild enough to be returned back into the jungle.
I couldn’t remember some of the names of the animals we encountered in ARCAS, so I turned to Wikipedia. It turns out, Kinkajou is in fact a Raccoon! Well at least from the same family, which is Procyonidae (raccoons), just like the Pizote (see under the cut) which ARCAS had three of: Adult male, female, and a juvenile. A perfect little family, only that the “father” was extremely aggressive. Wile the adult female was very friendly and climbed the walls of her cage for the passers by to scratch behind her ear, the male bit anybody he got a chance to. Wendy – a girl from the States who left the project a day after we arrived, entered the Pizote’s cage (not knowing that this cage was off limits) for one last photo, and got bitten so badly her wound wouldn’t stop bleeding hours after the incident. I and Tiffany (a former nurse from the States) had to pressure-bandage her that evening with our own supplies.
Speaking of aggressive, all the animals mentioned above are from the same Suborder: Caniformia (the Order being: Carnivora (carnivores)), and the most hostile of which, at least in ARCAS, I found were members of the Mustelidae (mustelids) family – the Tayras. Seemingly harmless at first, they would be the animal I would least like meeting in the jungle. Give me a full-grown Jaguar over two of these any time. At first, I couldn’t understand why their cage was off-limits for the volunteers at the first place. To me they just looked like magnificent weasels with their coffee-colored bodies, and beige heads. They looked like something my Kinkajou cold grow into, but after Alejandro (our twenty-four-year old ARCAS vet) has let me join-in on one of the feedings, and I almost lost a hand trying to feed a banana to one of them, all the gentle feelings I had towards the Tayras have dissipated.
Raccoon. ARCAS has three of these as well. They are extremely playful and always try to steal food from adjacent cages. Once one of them bit me, but not strongly enough to break skin.
Margay – The only Feline in ARCAS whose cage we were allowed in. Still, the danger was more than clear and we stayed as far as possible never turning our backs to these beauties.
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