Today, when most people think of chinchillas, they imagine the cute furry animals they’ve seen in pet stores. These animals are all the descendants of twelve chinchillas brought from Chile to California by Mathias F. Chapman approximately one hundred years ago. These chinchillas were actually brought to the US to start a chinchilla farm so that the animals might be raised for their fur. Over time, these animals have been domesticated and bred into the friendly animals that can be found in pet stores across the country.
Unfortunately, wild chinchillas have been heavily hunted and are rapidly approaching extinction. Chinchilla fur is some of the softest fur used for clothing. Amongst fashion designers, chinchilla fur is referred to as ‘soft gold’ for its extreme value. Some records state that as far back as 1500 BC, indigenous peoples had wars initiated over the rights to these precious furs. Starting in the 1800s, chinchilla furs started to get exported at high rates from South America. The chinchilla was hunted at a rate faster than it could reproduce and its population quickly dwindled. In 1929, Chile passed laws outlawing the hunting of chinchillas, but these laws were not seriously enforced until more than fifty years later.
There are two documented species of chinchillas, the Chinchilla brevicaudata (short-tailed chinchilla) and the Chinchilla lanigera (long-tailed chinchilla). A third species, the giant chinchilla, has already been hunted to extinction. As of 2008, both surviving species of chinchilla are listed as critically endangered (the final classification before ‘extinct in the wild’) according to the 2008 Red List of the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources). The long-tailed chinchilla is known only to exist in central Chile though its range once spanned across the Andes Mountains in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.
In addition to being hunted, rapid development, mining, and grazing animals are rapidly destroying the chinchilla’s wild habitat. This summer I am working in Illapel, Chile teaching Leave No Trace Environmental Education workshops in local schools and planting seedlings of native fauna to restore the essential habitat for the long-tailed chinchilla (as well as other native insect, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammalian species). The organization, Save the Wild Chinchillas, with which I am working, works in close communion with the local community and provides education and awareness programs to help locals understand how to protect the natural chinchilla habitat and appreciate the importance of its maintenance in the face of the dwindling chinchilla population. The organization works to create designated livestock grazing areas which helps prevent habitat destruction. Save the Wild Chinchillas is a registered US Non-Profit Organization, 501(c)3 Internal Revenue Code.
To learn more, visit www.wildchinchillas.org .
Amy Deane, founder of Save the Wild Chinchillas, is single-handedly running this organization while also being a single-mother to three pre-school aged daughters. How she’s doing this all is beyond me. Amy is quite the character, as are many people in this town. Perhaps one of the most priceless moments we share is pushing her car to start it whenever we go to town. After her daughters load up in their car seats in the back, we open the car doors and set off at a run until we get the vehicle rolling fast enough for her to jump in and start it, at which point I try to smoothly slide in to the passenger side and swing the door shut behind behind. I’m still working on the smoothly part. It’s very Little Miss Sunshine.
And to answer the last question I posed, how did I end up here? I have one summer totally my own. No resume building needed: Slapping an MIT degree with a GPA to be proud of on the resume buys me at least a few months and then I start grad school in the fall. So, after four years of focusing on developing myself, putting my mind through the most wild work-out it had ever experienced, I wanted to step away from science for a while and devote some time to a cause greater than me. Unaware that I was receiving financial aid while studying abroad in Italy, MIT surprised me with enough of a paycheck upon my return from Europe to cover the summer's expenses. The only question was where in the world might I go. I wanted to explore some place new, another culture, another part of the world. In February I found a website that has gathered together affordable volunteer opportunities around the world. From here, I began sending out emails, pricing out possible summer activities, and looking into the United States government's warnings on various countries. All in all, this opportunity just weighed out best. So here I am!
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