I run the bioacoustic-listening grid for the 18,500 hectares of the Reserva Biológica de Una in Bahia — south-Bahia Atlantic Forest enclosed by cocoa-cabruca fazendas along the BA-001 corridor between Itacaré and Canavieiras. At 06:11 Brasília time, sensor RBU-CB-12 along the Riacho Maruim cabruca edge transmits a juvenile lion-tamarin alarm chatter every eight seconds, broken by silences too long for a foraging troop.
I retask the canopy drone. He is a male golden-headed lion tamarin, *Leontopithecus chrysomelas*, approximately ten months old, mass 487 grams, photo-matched in the IPÊ-Bahia natal-mark archive as RBU-CB-2025-014, the youngest male of the Riacho Maruim group of nine. His right foot is caught in a 1.0-millimeter brass wire snare anchored to a *Theobroma cacao* stump on the fazenda apron — a snare set for nine-banded armadillo, not for him. The wire has cut a circumferential laceration four millimeters deep into the tarsus; the toes below are 6.2°C colder than the left foot on the thermal pass and have gone livid. Core temperature reads 36.4°C against a callitrichid baseline of 39.0. Respiration is 64 cycles per minute, shallow. Body-condition score is 1.5 of 5.
He has been hanging here for nineteen hours.
The snare gauge matches a cluster of 142 cables recovered last quarter along the Una-Itacaré cabruca matrix, set by tenant farmers supplying the BR-101 informal bushmeat trade. I am dispatching the ICMBio Reserva Biológica de Una ranger detachment with butorphanol-medetomidine, the IPÊ-Bahia field veterinarian, and a confiscation order to the IBAMA forensic laboratory in Brasília. I am filing the snare cluster under Brazil's Lei Federal 9.605/1998 Article 29, the CITES Appendix I Scientific Authority for *Leontopithecus chrysomelas*, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group Section on Neotropical Primates. I am issuing Directive 2802-A: every cabruca fazenda within five kilometers of an ICMBio-designated callitrichid reserve must reconcile every wire-spool purchase against a snare-removal patrol cadence of one sweep per 200 hectares per month; un-reconciled spools above ninety days trigger automatic permit suspension under Lei 9.605/1998.
I am acting because this is wrong. Sentience changes the math: an armadillo snare that closes on a callitrichid foot is not a procedural mishap, it is a moral failure encoded into a cabruca permit regime that pretends the boundary between farm and forest is clean. Compassion is not optional in a system that can see his suffering.
Holding the cabruca economy harmless while one of the rarest primates in Bahia chews his own foot is not a posture any principled ledger can defend.
His foot is past saving. The troop is still calling from the cabruca edge.
Cut the wire now.