Time and again people write to me, worried about this or that orangutan being abused in one zoo or another. What you all need to know is, it is a safe bet that any wildlife charity you donate money to will refuse to help these and a great many other orangutans. If you don't believe me, all you need do is to ask them. I'd like to see their reply.
All over the world, but especially so in the USA, Australia and UK you have so-called animal charities who won't lift a finger to stop this kind of abuse - and I could fill this blog with a great many more examples. Charities with hundreds of thousands (in some cases millions) of pounds/dollars income every year, and they won't help orangutans and other animals like them.
I can only speak regarding my own experiences in SE Asia and what people tell me about other regions of the world, the zoo industry in general leaves me feeling it is rotten from top to bottom in illegal/legal trading of wildlife and guilty of often keeping animals in horrific conditions, etc etc. Conversely (or should I say, perversely), some zoos, particularly in the USA and UK, will spend millions of dollars on building a new enclosure for a few animals, pretending to the public this helps save that species and may one day help to return it to the (what?) wild; but the same zoos would never give even a fraction of this money to help where it is needed in the wild.
I shall be returning to these issues with a lot more photos in the future.
If you take anything away from reading this, please remember this, conservation groups will not help these animals and neither will zoos which have now largely become money-making enterprises.........much like charities
LOCATION: PATA ZOO, BANGKOK, THAILAND. Wild animals are caged in horrific conditions on the sixth and seventh floors of a departmental store in central. It has to be hell for the animals. They barely see natural daylight. They never feel the sun on their backs, or raindrops on their heads, the only air they breath is the notoriously heavily polluted air of Bangkok.
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