Nature Alert: Letters: Return orangutans to their mothers

Saturday 6 June 2009

Letters: Return orangutans to their mothers

Mon, 06/01/2009 12:57 PM | Reader's Forum The Jakarta Post

I find the article about Taman Safari Indonesia safari park seeking adoptive parents for four baby orangutans (The Jakarta Post, May 3) very troubling and sad. There are enough orphaned baby orangutans in rescue and rehabilitation centers without the zoo artificially creating four more orphans.

Orangutans share 97.5 percent of the same genes that humans have.

Unfortunately, they lack the ability to speak a language that humans can understand, but it is well-known that female orangutans and their babies share the same intense bond that human mothers and babies have for one another.

As in humans; the forced separation of a mother from her baby causes a great deal of anguish, a sense of loss, pain, longing and depression for both.

An orangutan baby nursing from its mother gains, from her milk, a resistance to various illnesses and diseases that cannot be gained from being raised by humans. The intense bond between an orangutan and her baby lasts approximately eight years during which the mother teaches her baby invaluable lessons on surviving in the rainforest.

Where to find food and when, what is safe to eat and what isn't safe, what branches will hold their weight and which ones won't, how to make a nest and how to react to and socialize with other orangutans are just a few of life's lessons that a mother orangutan teaches her baby.

Humans make a very poor substitute for an orangutan mother, her love, attention and training.

The safari park manager states that the baby orangutans have been separated from their mothers "to speed up the growth of the orangutan population." Orangutan rescue and rehabilitation centers are already overflowing with orphaned orangutans and orangutans ready to be released back into the rain forest but with no place to release them, so I see little purpose and little to gain from intentionally creating yet four more artificial orphans.

The reason orangutans are endangered is not because of a breeding problem, but rather one of habitat loss. Speeding up the growth of the orangutan population as Taman Safari Indonesia would have us to believe they are doing, does nothing but contribute to the problem of more orangutans than there are places for them to live in the wild.

The baby orangutans should be returned to their real mothers as soon as possible, not "adopted" by humans who will give them nothing that their own mothers can give them! Like human mothers, the orangutan mothers will recognize their own babies and be happy to have them back and yes, orangutans do feel and show happiness along with all the other emotions we humans feel!

Dave Weidman

USA

Hall of Shame for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the Palm Oil Industry.

Nothing can prepare one for the sight of the systematic extermination of orangutans by the government of Indonesia.

Look at the photos and news articles on these pages in the context of a statement the President made to the media on 10th December 2007.

“In the last 35 years about 50,000 orangutans are estimated to have been lost as their habitats shrank. If this continues, this majestic creature will likely face extinction by 2050,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said at the launch of an orangutan conservation plan at the climate talks in Bali.

“The fate of the orangutan is a subject that goes to the heart of sustainable forests … To save the orangutan we have to save the forest.”

Statements like these are most welcome, but unless backed up by action, such words fall on deaf ears within the Ministry of Forestry....who are busy granting licences to cut down the very forests the President says they should protect!

When you think you are to busy to help, please could you reflect for a moment on .........

The following extract refers to environmental problems in general. I just hope you find it as thought provoking and relevant to orangutans as I have.

"This is such a shocking and unpalatable fact that most people deny it, or they just don't want to think about it. They believe as individuals, they can do little about it, so push it to the back of their minds. But I can't do that.

When something has to be done, we need to do it. It doesn't matter how big the challenge is or how hard the solution; if I know something is wrong, and I am in a position to help, I will do my best to make it right." Duncan Bannatyne, successful British businessman.