Hey! Ralph here. In case you don’t know, I’m a coati. All the other guys from Tapuio were making appeals, so I thought I should too. Pulling my own weight and all. After all, I live here too.
David’s got a good idea. People don’t really care about things unless they can see it. And let’s face it, most of you aren’t about to come down here and spend a long hot buggy summer swatting flies and trekking through the brush just to protect baby birds and thoroughly disgusting tarantulas from destruction, let alone confront a man with a chain saw about to cut down MY HOME!!!
But you could. If you wanted. David’s got a house where you can stay and it even has running water.
But you won’t. So do the next best thing: Contribute so that David can. Contribute so he can bring you the pictures and stop the destruction and maybe even move onto plan B, total protection.
Go on, go to his campaign page and make a contribution. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Even nickels help. Take a look here!
I know Tapuio seems like a long way away from you and your lives, but it isn’t. What happens here can happen anywhere. You don’t put a stop to destruction all at once on a global scale. You do it one step at a time, place by place.
Make Tapuio one of those places.
About 12 years ago, one man went up to Tapuio with his rifle and killed ALL of the howler monkeys. All of them.
Monkeys have a reputation for eating small birds, birds people catch and put in cages. So he just decided to kill them all. He killed 72. In one day.
How does someone do that. How does someone kill 72 beautiful animals in one day without even blinking? How does that man still eat? How does he still have a family?
The answer is nobody called him on it. Most people don’t care, and those who do are intimidated and do almost nothing.
David has stood up to them. He has been able to stop some of the destruction. But as word spread that he no longer has a camera, the destruction returned.
So go on, help out, contribute. Give my children a chance to live so that your children can one day come here and walk with my children. And when they come here, they will know that you helped save this place. They will know that it is as much theirs as much as mine and that it doesn’t belong to any one of us but to all of us, together, as a place to live.
Salve Tapuio!
Update: The campaign ended a long time ago and any links to it have been deactivated. But you can still come to Tapuio!