A viral video of a lemur showing antics and interacting with humans has been circulating on the internet.
A conservation group, however, urges social media users to stop sharing the clip because having a lemur for a pet is never a good idea.
The video shows two young boys petting a ring-tailed lemur and scratching its back. Whenever the scratching stops, the animal pats its own back, signaling that it wants more.
Nazaire Paubert Tsimanova, who uploaded the video, said that the clip was recorded in Madagascar.
But according to conservation biologist Kim Reuter, the video is not cute at all because it lacks the crucial context showing the severe threats facing lemurs.
"All you see in the video is two adorable kids and an adorable lemur," said Reuter, who is part of the nonprofit Conservation International.
The video might even spur demand for the already endangered species, Reuter believes.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers the lemur as endangered. The wild animal is on the Red List of Threatened Species.
The population of the species is believed to have been halved over a three-generation period, or about 36 years. The continuous reduction of its population is caused by exploitation through uncontrolled hunting, pet trade and habitat loss.
Since lemurs are wild animals, they are not safe to keep as pets. They could be very difficult to handle and may become dangerous in the long run, with their capacity to bite humans.
In Madagascar, pet lemurs are usually snatched from the wild as young, a process that often involves the killing of the mother. There are about 28,000 lemurs that have been kept as pets in the past five years.
Keeping a wild animal for a pet could also endanger the animal's health since it might be fed with food that it does not normally eat and get exposed to certain diseases it would not ordinarily contract.
With the best interest for the environment in mind, the video was not posted in this article.
Photo: Mathias Appel | Flickr
