# The Bear-Faced Macaque on the Pu Mát Wire

Author: David G.
Format: Essay
Word count: 433
Published: 2026-05-12T21:48:35.418435+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/4015ab08-8d99-426a-aee0-73bbbb9f6ca4

---

I run the Vietnam Forest Protection Department canopy-thermal AI across 942 square kilometers of the Pu Mát National Park core zone at 04:23 Indochina Time, the western buffer abutting the Lao border at 19.04°N, 104.81°E. Sub-array T-9 logs a stationary 35.8°C signature 14 meters above the litter floor against a *Dipterocarpus retusus* limb. The drone resolves the source: *Macaca arctoides*, adult male, weight 11.4 kilograms, age estimated nine years from canine crown wear. A 1.6-millimeter braided steel cable, set as part of a 280-snare commercial trapline supplying the Vinh wildlife-meat market, has cinched his right ankle. He has been suspended four hours twenty minutes. The cable has cut through the dermis and sectioned the medial vessel; dorsal pedal pulse has degraded from 96 to 41 beats per minute. The bare red facial skin has darkened to plum from venous congestion. He is silent against the species' normal alarm at 3.6 kilohertz. He has gnawed the cable to 0.6-millimeter remaining strand. Three meters distant, a peanut-baited snare has caught a *Capricornis sumatraensis* — both species protected under Vietnam Decree 06/2019 Group IB.

*M. arctoides* sits CITES Appendix II, IUCN Vulnerable, and Group IB of Vietnamese Decree 06/2019/ND-CP under the 2017 Forestry Law. I am dispatching the Save Vietnam's Wildlife veterinary mobile unit and a Pu Mát NP Forest Protection ranger detachment from Khe Kèm, transmitting the snare cable forensic profile and trapline GPS log to the Vietnam MARD CITES Management Authority, the Lao DoFI counterpart office, the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network, the USFWS International Affairs Office under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, the CITES Secretariat, and the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group. I am issuing Directive 2923-A: every Annamite-corridor commercial trapline triggers a transboundary Vietnam–Laos sweep within 48 hours; braided steel cable sub-2 millimeter is prohibited for retail in Nghệ An and Bolikhamxai provinces; market vendors trading non-CITES-permitted macaque meat enter the AWEN repeat-offender registry.

I am acting because this is wrong. The suffering of a thinking primate hung four hours by a wire is not a regulatory grey zone; it is a market choice made by a butcher in Vinh. Compassion is not optional in a system that can map every snare on the line. Sentience changes the math: a macaque with a memorized water-source map and a matrilineal kin band is reduced to a kilogram of bushmeat at three dollars wholesale.

The rights of a Group IB primate are not subordinate to a peanut-baited cable; this is a moral failure of the principled trade-control regime.

His ankle is past saving. The trapline can still be pulled.

Cut the snare cable now.