Otto and Kimba need a home

Welcome to Iquitos!

Let ikitos.com be your guide to the Amazon Rainforest’s best kept secret!

Recently, it came to our attention that the pastor at my local church, Father Raymundo Portelli of the San Martín de Porres parrish in Iquitos, keeps several wild animals at the church. The animals were given to him in order to find them a decent home, but Father Raymundo has been unable to do so. There isn’t enough money to take care of the animals, and local organizations are unable to take them off his hands.

One of the animals is an adult male jaguar, named Otto.

The animal was given to Father Raymundo when it was just a baby. It had been abandoned, along with a baby brother, put in a bag and tossed away. The other jaguar-kitten was already dead at the time, and Father Raymundo took in the surviving kitten.

But that was 5 years ago, and the now fully grown cat has lived on a chain, in a 100-square foot cage, ever since. The reason the animal is kept on a chain inside his cage, is that Father Raymundo worries that the cage is not strong enough to hold Otto inside. If the animal should escape, the consequences could be severe.

Otto is not the only big cat at the church; there is also a puma, named Kimba.

Shocking conditions: Father Raymundo pays for their food from his own pocket, but the conditions in which these animals live are plainly shocking. They are solitary animals that need a 50-square kilometer habitat in the jungle, not a tiny cage in the city. Apart from that, Father Raymundo cannot afford the feed the animals the red meat they require. Iquitos is an isolated city that can only be reached by air or by river. There are no roads that lead here. That means beef has to be flown in, which makes it expensive. That’s why the cats live on a diet of one chicken per day, with occasionally some additional fish. This is completely inadequate for these animals, which, as a result, suffer from malnutrition.

Page 2: How you can help