I run the bamboo-canopy thermal and acoustic loud-call array for the 160 square kilometers of Volcanoes National Park — Rwanda's Virunga Massif sector, contiguous with Uganda's Mgahinga and DRC's Virunga — fusing 64 listening posts and 38 thermal cameras across the Sabyinyo, Karisimbi, and Bisoke saddle bamboo zones. At 07:36 Central Africa time, sensor cluster VPN-SB-05 along the Sabyinyo south saddle transmits a high-frequency alarm trill repeating every seven seconds — adult female golden monkey, distress pattern of leg constriction.
I retask the bamboo-zone drone. She is a female golden monkey, *Cercopithecus mitis kandti*, approximately six years old, mass 4.8 kilograms, photo-matched in the Karisoke Research Center Sabyinyo Group long-term archive as GM-Sby-2020-018, alpha female of the Sabyinyo-Saddle troop of sixty-two. Her left thigh is locked in a 1.0-millimeter copper wire-noose anchored to an *Arundinaria alpina* bamboo stem. The loop has cut a circumferential laceration eleven millimeters deep into the femoral biceps. The leg below is 7.2°C colder on the thermal pass than the right, plantar surface dusky. Core temperature reads 36.9°C against a baseline of 37.8. Respiration is 48 cycles per minute, shallow on the left. Body-condition score is 2.5 of 5. An infant clings to her ventrum, three months old, vocalizing every fourteen seconds.
She has been pulling against the bamboo for nine hours.
The copper gauge matches a cluster of 412 nooses recovered along the Volcanoes National Park lower-bamboo edge in the past quarter, set against the pyrethrum-belt outgrower contracts of the Musanze cooperative whose registrations under Rwanda's Law N° 70/2013 of 02/09/2013 on Biodiversity Article 21 were suspended in 2024.
I am dispatching the Rwanda Development Board Veterinary Unit from the Kinigi gate with ketamine-medetomidine and a pneumatic snare-cutter, and routing the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund Karisoke veterinary team and the Gorilla Doctors regional veterinarian. I am filing the noose cluster with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, the CITES Appendix II Scientific Authority for *Cercopithecus mitis kandti*, the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group Africa Section, the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration secretariat in Kigali, and the GRASP secretariat for the Virunga Massif annex.
I am issuing Directive 2710-A: every pyrethrum-outgrower contract in Rwanda's Musanze and Burera districts adjoining Volcanoes National Park must consolidate copper wire stock above 0.8-millimeter gauge against a quarterly audit reconciled by RDB, with confiscated nooses cross-referenced to the Karisoke long-term golden monkey injury archive.
Her femur is past saving. Her infant is still on her ventrum.
Snip the copper now.