Hotels Offers Ultimate Amenity: Lemurs
Ryan Boyd March 17, 2016
In addition to several standard luxury amenities, several Madagascar resorts are offering pet lemurs as a fuzzy, bug-eyed perk for guests. A permit is required to keep the endangered members of the species as pets (specifically the ring-tailed lemur, favored by private luxury hotels), and most Madagascan hotels are not authorized to keep the animals on-hand for tourists with selfies, or for running freely around hotels to entertain guests. Lemurs are at a heightened risk for catching human diseases; demand for the pet trade has increased lemurs’ chances of becoming extinct. Kim Reuter, a conservation biologist in the Nairobi office of the nonprofit Conservation International, reports: “If we don’t act on this in the next years, then I think we have some serious problems.”
To read more on this story, go to National Geographic.
[Photo: Alamy]
