06.21.07 kulturnatib

Dear Paul

Thank you for your letter. You hit the proverbial nail right on the head. Several nails, actually.

Ignorance and not malevolence is, indeed, often the root of behavior that is, at the very least, disrespectful of other creatures – humans included -- and their habitats.

Yet, when it is ignorance from up and down the whole chain of actors, which you have rightly identified as from the Department of Tourism (DOT) officials – which you can then extend all the way to the top of the executive link in government – to airline and travel magazine executives to the lowly tourist attraction stall attendants – though you should excuse the last as they really have no say in that matter – then you have to wonder if this is not a question of willful ignorance and not all that simple ignorance.

Is this not the ignorance of the wide-awake who are the most difficult, as to be impossible, to awaken?

Thank you for mentioning and quoting extensively from a travel guide book, The Philippine Travel Atlas, that identifies Bohol as being an “emerging prime tourist destination,” home to the tarsier that, among its other features, has “large, round, staring eyes.”

I do not think that you meant to single out this publication among the dozens out there that more or less say the same thing and would show the almost obligatory picture of a clinging tarsier with eyes that are in varying degrees of largeness, roundness and fixedness of stare.

But, yes, your point in mentioning this publication is that airlines, airline and travel publications are but cogs – important ones – in the tourism industry. While they mouth the correct sound bites about eco-tourism, responsible tourism, etc., the fact is that everything, or nearly everything is only second voice to the soaring solo of the higher registers of the cash box.

Here is where there is serious disconnect between the promotional and the regulatory functions of the DOT and the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DENR). In fact, the disconnect is serious enough to believe that the DOT is all promotion and hardly any regulation, and with the DENR, regulation is so obviously selective as to be mostly ineffective.

What else to make of a photo in an entry on the Philippine tarsier in Wikipedia that shows a sign that says, “DENR PERMITTED CAPTIVE TARSIER!?” This sign is in Loboc, where this Wikipedia entry identifies as the only place that tarsiers can be seen not in the wild but in such conditions that necessitated the very law in the first place that the DENR is supposed to implement in order to prevent the tarsiers abuse and extinction.

This is a case – one of the numerous in this country – where the authority of a government department is invoked against its very self by (supposedly) permitting something it has no authority to permit, and if so, which this sign purports, such permission can only be a mockery of that very same authority.

Still, as you suggest, most people, tourists are better than that. True, in many zoos and wildlife sanctuaries elsewhere that are accessible to the public, the public will respond accordingly to instructions about how to behave towards the animals. The place is designed, too, in such a way as to encourage compliance and discourage abusive behavior sometimes with disincentives like fines.

Fortunately, there is such a place for the tarsiers and tourists in Bohol, in Corella, where both can meet – though this is by no means always guaranteed – in a manner that heightens the enjoyment of the latter and hardly at the expense of the former.

You admit that you haven't seen a tarsier, but your wife has. I encourage you to visit the Philippine Tarsier Foundation's Tarsier Research and Development Center in Corella. This is a bit out of the way – off the tourist path, as that Wikipedia entry puts it -- and the roads there may not all be that well paved. This, as far as I remember, from the last time I was there years ago. It might have actually been improved now.

However the present condition of the sanctuary, it still remains, for me, one of the best places for visiting tarsiers that are truly in the wild. You can inquire before going there as to when the best time and season to go, or you can just wander in as I did. The wardens are really very knowledgeable and there are plenty of instructional, informative material around.

As for your suggestion that Cebu Pacific can play a major role in funding promotional material, i.e., billboards, on how to treat tarsiers and other wild life more respectfully, I am more sanguine.

I just think that it would be a good enough first step to admit that to continue to promote the misrepresentation of the wide-eyed tarsier, especially through a photo taken so obviously at daytime, is detrimental to the tarsiers themselves even if they are somehow cute and it is how everybody else is promoting them.

So far that step is still forthcoming from them. Or, so, I hope. Otherwise, there are, fortunately now, other airlines.