This is my personal evaluation of the effectiveness of the conservation efforts. 

1) Government’s decree and laws (both national and international) are relatively effective, if intricately matched with strict monitoring and consistent punishments.

(-) However, the long-term effectiveness relies heavily on compliance of citizens.

(-) Especially in the issue of forest protection, the strict monitoring might not be able to be imposed.

(-) Strong community cooperation and general consensus need to be present in order for laws to work, and this is a challenge.

 2) Rescue Centres

Why are rehabilitation centres so important and in laymen’s terms, positive?

(+) Hunting and poaching endangered primates has been illegal since 1992 in Vietnam. The irony thought, it is still the most prominent threat to wildlife. Hence the need for extra effort to curb this.

(+) More often than not, rescue centres are the ONLY homes available for captured, injured and diseased primates. Vietnam’s Forestry Protection Department can only capture culprits who break the laws but once they arrest the culprits, the victimised primates have nowhere to go. If suitable centres are not available, injured or diseased primates may be returned to the forest to die, or even sold back to the illegal trader.

However, rescue centres might be dubious at times.

(-) How “real” and committed are they in helping the primates? There’s an unspoken worry that rescue centres might be holding a facade. There might be internal secrets – what’s presented to public might not be equitable to what’s happening behind closed doors. How the primates are handled and where they are placed, are information that public would appreciate if made transparent. Some rescue centres are flawed in a way that they house animals in very constrained and small cages. The video attached below is an example of rescued primates kept in restrictive cages that restricts movements.