TEACHING Indonesian children natural history can change attitudes towards the illegal wildlife trade according to a team of Oxford researchers.

New research, which has assessed the impact of a children’s storybook on a critically endangered species – the Javan slow loris – was published on Monday by scientific journal Conservation Biology.

Oxford Brookes University, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia and the Little Fireface Project carried out the research and produced a book and education programme designed to teach children about the nocturnal primates that are under threat because of being captured from the wild and traded illegally as pets.

Professor Anna Nekaris, Professor in Primate Conservation and Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Little Fireface Project, wrote the book and was the lead author of the study.

She said: “After assessing more than 50 books written for primate conservation projects, I was shocked to see that more than 80% per cemt of them contained scenes of fire, animals in tears and death.

"Education theorists have pointed out that such story writing can be destructive and cause readers to have a sense of hopelessness, or even sadness and fear.

“Children’s books should spark imagination and be delightful – with this in mind, the book was carefully created so that children would want to return to read it again and again.”

The book, titled Slow Loris Forest Protector, follows the story of a mother and son slow loris moving through their agroforest environment.