Peque scratches her head on a wooden branch inside a wired enclosure at a rescue center in Nosara, Costa Rica — small, quiet, and alive, though barely. She was found electrocuted on a power line beside her mother, who did not survive. Her tail and hands were burned.
She was not alone. In 2025, more than 100 animals arrived at International Animal Rescue Costa Rica with injuries from the same cause. Howler monkeys made up nearly 90 percent of those cases — drawn onto uninsulated lines they cannot distinguish from the forest canopy they have always traveled through.
A rescue center overwhelmed by a preventable crisis
The International Animal Rescue Costa Rica center in Nosara sits at the edge of a forest being steadily consumed by development. Veterinarian Francisco Sánchez has watched intake numbers climb since joining nearly a decade ago. In 2025, the center logged 108 electrocuted animals — howler monkeys accounting for up to 90 percent of cases.
Hotels, restaurants, and housing developments are pushing into once-continuous forest. “We are rescuing from further inside the forest,” Sánchez says. Electrocution zones that did not exist a few years ago are now active.
The injuries are severe. An initial shock can cause heart damage and kidney failure. Animals that survive the contact may fall several meters, catch fire from transformer heat, or land near a car or dog. For infant monkeys like Peque — who lost her mother on the same line — burns, neurological damage, and the trauma of sudden orphaning can all follow a single moment of contact with a bare wire.
Why monkeys keep making a fatal mistake
The behavior that puts howler monkeys on power lines is entirely logical from their perspective. As forests fragment, monkeys scan for routes between isolated patches. A power line stretching from pole to pole looks like a connected series of trees. “To them,” says environmental consultant Justo Martín Martín, who works with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, “a power line is essentially a line of connected trees.”
Martín notes that incidents cluster where high primate density and high power-line density overlap — particularly in fragmented ecosystems. The technical root of the problem is straightforward: uninsulated bare wiring carries a lethal charge the moment an animal bridges two conductors or a grounded surface. Insulated cables or underground lines are the only reliable fixes. There is no behavioral solution. You cannot train a monkey to avoid a path that looks, to every instinct it has, like the safest route available.
A court ruling that could change the national picture
In January, Costa Rica’s constitutional court delivered a ruling that conservation groups had spent years working toward. The court found that state-owned electricity company ICE and the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) had failed to implement effective measures to prevent wildlife electrocution in the Nosara district, giving both institutions six months to address the problem on lines built with bare wiring.
Twenty conservation organizations and rescue centers — including International Animal Rescue Costa Rica — had built sustained pressure through a campaign called “This Is NOT Pura Vida,” a deliberate inversion of the phrase Costa Ricans use to express wellbeing and optimism. MINAE has stated it has already implemented “a broad range of measures” and promoted collaborative processes for technical solutions. A three-year action plan from both MINAE and ICE is expected by the end of June.
A global problem hiding in plain sight
Costa Rica is unusual in one specific way: it actually counts. It is the only country thought to regularly log wildlife electrocution numbers. A single year — June 2022 to June 2023 — recorded 6,262 cases, giving researchers a rare baseline. Almost everywhere else, the data is fragmented or absent.
In South Africa, approximately 432 mammals were reportedly killed on power-line infrastructure between 1997 and 2019, according to an IUCN report. Researchers in Diani, a coastal town in southern Kenya, documented 370 primate electrocution incidents between 1998 and 2016. “There are few systematic studies but there is abundant evidence,” Martín says, “from scientific articles to social media reports, that the problem is global.” The true scale remains difficult to quantify — no one has built the infrastructure to measure it consistently.
Solutions exist — but scaling them is the hard part
The technical toolkit is not in dispute. Insulated cables eliminate the core risk. Barriers at pole tops can block animals from reaching conductors, and artificial canopy bridges — made from rope, plastic, or other materials — give primates a safe alternative route between forest fragments. Deploying any of these at scale is where the difficulty lies.
Gavin Bruce, chief executive of International Animal Rescue, sees the Nosara ruling as a starting point. “Although this case was built on data from the Nosara area, the problem is nationwide,” he says. Sánchez shares that ambition but stays measured. “I’m being realistic because I understand it’s really huge work,” he says. The June deadline for MINAE and ICE’s three-year action plan will be the first concrete signal of whether the ruling translates into real change. For the monkeys still traveling lines that look like trees, what happens next is a matter of survival.