Name Rita Miljo | ||
 | ||
Died July 27, 2012, Phalaborwa, South Africa | ||
Rita miljo
Rita Miljo (1931 Klaipėda, Lithuania - 27 July 2012 Phalaborwa district), was a renowned conservationist and animal rights pioneer noted for founding and managing the "Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education" (CARE) near Phalaborwa in South Africa. She died in a fire which swept through her home and the centre located on a 50-acre reserve on the banks of the Olifants River. She was 81 at the time of her death. The first baboon she ever saved, in 1980, also died in the blaze, with two other baboons.
Contents
Born Rita Neumann, she joined the League of German Girls (the girls' wing of the Hitler Youth) at age 8. She enjoyed the sports competition, and being able to escape an “overprotective mother”. As for Nazism, she said that “only today, in hindsight, do I understand the total madness we were subjected to”. Her plans to qualify as a veterinarian were thwarted by the postwar West German policy of favouring war veterans for admission to universities. After working in a Hamburg zoo, she followed a mining engineer, Lothar Simon to South Africa in 1953 and became his wife. While married to Simon she became a proficient pilot and he later died, with her 17-year-old daughter, in a 1972 light aircraft crash. Ten years later, she bought the small Lowveld farm that would become her baboon centre. A short-lived second marriage which ended in divorce, was to Piet Miljo, a South African.
At first the centre rescued a variety of small animals, such as bushbabies, civets, warthogs, duikers, porcupines, assorted reptiles and birds. Soon large numbers of orphaned, injured and abused chacma baboons were being brought to the centre. Despite being listed in the CITES Appendix II, they enjoy almost no protection under South African law. Shrinking and degrading their habitat has brought them into conflict with farmers. Prior to Miljo's sanctuary, no facilities existed in South Africa for rehabilitating these orphans.
Consequently, in 1989 she started the centre to nurse orphaned and injured baboons back to health, at the same time pioneering methods of reintroducing troops of convalesced baboons back into their natural habitat. The first such group of 10 baboons was released back into the wild in 1994, confounding many skeptical professional primatologists. In all, more than a dozen troops, totalling some 250 baboons, were released in the last 20 years of her life. Her standard response to police and prosecutors who harassed her and regarded baboons as vermin, was "Who are you to tell God that he should not have created baboons?"
Sponsorship from IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare), and other financial backing, resulted in a steady stream of volunteer workers, scientists and students, and the rehabilitation facility became known around the world. Nelson Mandela's presence at one of the successful releases of rehabilitated troops in 2002, eased her persecution by authorities.
Her ideals followed those of Jane Goodall’s with chimpanzees in Tanzania, Dian Fossey’s with gorillas in Rwanda and Biruté Galdikas’s with orangutans in Indonesian Borneo. However, Rita Miljo had not started her work with formal scientific training, and she was motivated to help animals for humanitarian reasons. In 1980 she removed a battered young baboon from a national park in Angola. She rescued many baboon orphans, finding one clinging to the dead body of its mother in a garbage dump. A number of rescued baboons were being held captive for their faeces which could be used in tribal medicines. Others were the subject of medical experiments.