The Saga of Bua Noi and Pata Zoo
by Daniel Stiles
Bua Noi, meaning ‘Little Lotus’ in Thai, is the only gorilla in Thailand. She has been residing since 1987 in the privately owned Pata Zoo in Bangkok, which takes up the top two floors of the seven-story high Pata Pinklao Department Store in the unfashionable west side of the Chaophraya River, which cuts through Bangkok, Thailand’s capital and largest city (8.2 million people).
Pata Zoo was opened in 1983 by Vinai Sermsirimongkol, a businessman who owned the department store. Vinai converted the top two floors into a zoo, with cabinets and glass cases holding reptiles and amphibians on the sixth floor and mammals in cramped cages on the top floor, including chimpanzees, orangutans, tigers, other big cats, bears and a male gorilla that Vinai named King Kong, which arrived in 1984 with a CITES export permit from the Aachen Bird and Animal Park in West Germany. The Thai CITES import permit was issued to Siam Farm Zoological Garden, Bangkok. No further details are known, unfortunately, since this trade was not reported to the CITES Trade Database by either country.
When Vinai died, his younger brother Kanit took over and has been fighting doggedly to keep “the world’s saddest zoo” open to the public. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Thai animal welfare crusader Sinjira Apaitan have been campaigning for years to have the zoo closed and the animals freed. Sinjira launched a petition to free Bua Noi, which aims to get 150,000 signatures. This year Sinjira joined forces with Polish activist Joanna Sobkowicz to launch the website freegorilla.org to raise awareness of Bua Noi’s story and give updates about the campaign to free her.
“I met with Kanit in 2014”, Sinjira told me. “He promised to move all of the large animals from the rooftop by 2020. I am waiting.”
The stumbling block has been that the Pata Zoo owners, backed up by the government, insist that Bua Noi was acquired legally.
“Don’t use mob rule here,” Pata Zoo owner Kanit Sermsirimongkol said to the press in 2014. “We have complied with all relevant laws”.
But have they?
Investigations
PEGAS launched an investigation this year. I combed through old copies of the very informative International Primate Protection League newsletters, exchanged emails with IPPL’s founder Shirley McGreal, scoured the gorilla studbooks, used Google to search out old stories on Pata Zoo and Bua Noi on the Internet, searched various NGO websites and social media accounts of individuals named who were connected with gorilla trafficking and reviewed the TRAFFIC reports on great ape trade.
From the information amassed PEGAS has reconstructed a scenario that is consistent with known facts.
The Scenario[1]
Bibi received the order for four more baby gorillas in July 1987 from his father Walter, who was in Hohenstadt near Nuremberg in what then was West Germany. Walter Sensen had moved back in 1985 from Equatorial Guinea, a former colony of Spain, to Hohenstadt because of a few brushes with the authorities, just as earlier in 1981 he had had to escape from neighboring Cameroon after being arrested for great ape trafficking. Bibi replaced Walter in 1985 and now lived in Bata, a pleasant town on the Equatorial Guinea coast about 30 kilometers south of the border with Cameroon. Walter and Bibi were wild animal traffickers supplying shady zoos around the world with rare animals using their company African Animal Export. Bribes had secured them a five-year exclusive contract with the government for exports of gorillas and chimpanzees.
Bibi, real name Bernd Sensen, sent out word to his contacts in the villages of Rio Muni (mainland Equatorial Guinea) and nearby Cameroon and Gabon that he needed baby gorillas. Kurt Schaefer and Dr. Daeng of Siam Farm in Bangkok had put in an order for the four infants. By early September Bibi had the four infant gorillas, two males and two females, all under a year old. The gorilla mothers had ended up as bushmeat, killed and butchered in front of their terrified infants.
Equatorial Guinea was not a member of CITES at the time and the Sensen’s had an in with the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Promotion of Enterprise, Florencio Esoro Obiang Angue, who signed a ministerial export permit number 381 for the four gorillas. Bernd submitted the permit to the Thailand CITES Management Authority in Bangkok and requested an import permit, but they rejected the minister’s document as not equivalent to a CITES export permit. Since gorillas were listed as CITES Appendix I, protected from commercial trade, Bernd knew that without a Thai import permit they had a problem.
Walter made some telephone calls to traders he knew and made a new arrangement. Only one gorilla would go to Thailand — it was too risky shipping all four now that the Thailand authorities were alerted — and two would go to Aritake Chojouten in Japan, a notorious animal trafficker. It wouldn’t be difficult to find a buyer for the fourth. Bibi got hold of Wabi Bello, a Nigerian trafficker who specialized in African grey parrots, to get him a Certificado de Origen. The Certificate of Origin had Wabi Bello’s name on it and showed that he was exporting one gorilla that weighed 10 kilograms to Siam Farm Zoological Garden, Bangkok, Thailand. The document had official-looking stamps on it, so Bibi was happy and paid Bello the agreed price.
Bernd Sensen flew with the four gorillas as personal effects to Spain on Iberia airlines, using Minister Angue’s export permit. On 9 September 1987 he shipped the baby gorilla from Spain to Bangkok with the certificado de origen and two were shipped the same month to Chojouten in Japan, where he sold them to Chiba City Municipal Zoo for US$575,000. Fraudulent documents claimed that the two gorillas were bred in Ringland Circus, a modest outfit that toured Spain, it didn’t even have a permanent home.
The Iberia airlines waybill for Bua Noi identified the recipient as Dr. Daeng, Pata Zoo, Bangkok. The Pata Zoo owner, Vinai Sermsirimongkol, paid Siam Farm the agreed price for Bua Noi, just as he had paid them for Bwana in 1984. Vinai hoped that when Bua Noi became old enough she would mate with Bwana, now renamed King Kong, and give him valuable offspring to sell and recoup his expenses.
Walter Sensen was convicted and jailed for 2 years on 14 March 1990 in West Germany for illegally shipping three gorillas from Cameroon in January 1987 to Taiwan. He was later freed on appeal and continued to export gorillas and other great apes from Central Africa, assisted by his son Bernd. The situation became so alarming that the CITES Secretariat had to issue a Notification in 1988 warning CITES Parties not to accept imports of CITES-listed species from Equatorial Guinea.
Summing up
So Bua Noi was not born in a German zoo, was not imported legally from anywhere, but rather she was just one of many ill-fated gorilla and chimpanzee infants captured in the wild by bushmeat hunters who killed their mothers and sold them off to traffickers. In the 33 years that Little Lotus has been suffering in her concrete cage in Pata Zoo she has paid back the zoo owners many times over what she cost them.
In 1987 there was no national law in Thailand for implementation of CITES provisions, so it is debatable whether importation without CITES permits would constitute illegality in a court of law today. But since Bua Noi was essentially smuggled into the country, Customs import, veterinary health and perhaps tax laws were broken. That would be for Thai government prosecutors to decide.
The Pata Zoo license is once again up for renewal and there seems more of a chance this time that it will not be renewed. If Pata Zoo were closed and Bua Noi freed, using the evidence presented here, it would send a strong signal that other private zoos could be closed — if verification could be obtained that animals were acquired illegally.
Illegal capture of endangered species in the wild for commercial zoos and the exotic pet trade is an enormous problem. Added risks of zoonotic spillover events are only too evident with the current COVID-19 pandemic. Commercial zoos such as Pata and many others like it encourage human-animal interaction for a fee (framed selfie photos, petting, playing, etc.). Three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, transferred from animals to humans, facilitated by environmental destruction and wildlife crime.
It is in the best interests of both humans and animals that commercial zoos and safari parks stop importing animals captured in the wild. Closing Pata Zoo and freeing Bua Noi would help current efforts to stop this type of wildlife trade and signal to the world that change is possible.
[1] Walter Sensen is deceased, but a draft of this article was sent to Bernd Sensen asking for corrections or comments. None have been received.
