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With the clearing of forests, baby Orangutans are marooned

By Rhett Butler - posted Friday, 3 July 2009


"Our rescue teams began to be informed of wandering wild orangutans in human settlements,” said Desilets. “We have found orangutans beaten to death with wooden planks and iron bars, butchered by machetes, beaten unconscious and buried alive, and doused with petrol and set alight. Since 2004, more and more orangutans in our centres have been rescued from areas within or near oil palm plantations, and over 90 per cent of the infants up to three years of age come from these areas."

Indonesia and Malaysia are the world's largest producers of palm oil, accounting for more than 85 per cent of global output. Palm oil demand has risen sharply over the past two decades due to its wide use in foods, beauty products, and even as a feedstock for biodiesel. Accordingly, the area of land under cultivation in Indonesia and Malaysia has expanded exponentially, growing from less than 580 square miles in 1984 to more than 46,000 square miles today. Unlike logged forest, which has the capacity to support at least some orangutans, timber and oil palm plantations are not viable habitats for orangutans. If they can't move to other areas - due to isolation or conflict with other orangutans - they will perish without human intervention.

But orangutan rehabilitation centres are ill equipped to handle this tide of oil palm orphans. It can cost more than $2,000 per year to feed and care for an orangutan, which, if raised from infancy, may be reared for eight to ten years, perhaps longer. Training a baby orangutan to live on its own in the wild is a painstaking process, as human caretakers must teach the young apes basic skills, such as how to climb, forage, build nests, and even avoid dangers like snakes. (Rubber snakes are used; the trainer acts frightened and makes loud noises when the rubber snake is uncovered from leaves.)

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As the orangutans get older, they are given more time in the forest until they eventually are living on their own on an "orangutan island", a forested island in the middle of a river. As their skills improve and they become more independent, the orangutans are moved to sites within natural forest areas.

Today, many issues complicate reintroduction. First and foremost is whether the habitat is secure. Finding safe forest is increasingly difficult, and there have been several recent instances where reintroduction sites have been cleared after the orangutans were returned, with tragic consequences.

Earlier this year, Globalindo Agung Lestari - a subsidiary of palm oil giant Musim Mas Group - cleared a section of forest near Mawas, a reserve in Kalimantan where some 80 wild orangutans had been released. Hardi Baktiantoro of the Centre for Orangutan Protection, an activist group in Kalimantan, says all the reintroduced orangutans likely perished.

.In Sungai Wain, a protected forest in East Kalimantan, fires and logging by a coal mining company wiped out another reintroduction site last year. And in May, the Frankfurt Zoological Society warned that a plan by Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) and Sinar Mas Group to log thousands of acres of unprotected rainforest near Bukit Tigapuluh National Park on Sumatra could doom a portion of an introduction site for the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan.

"It took scientists decades to discover how to successfully reintroduce critically endangered orangutans from captivity into the wild,” said Peter Pratje of the Frankfurt Zoological Society. “It could take APP just months to destroy an important part of their new habitat. These lowland forests are excellent habitat for orangutans, which is why we got government permission to release them here beginning in 2002. The apes are thriving now, breeding and establishing new family groups."

Some conservationists worry that developers may see reintroduction programs as an alternative to preserving orangutans in their natural habitat, thereby eliminating the need to preserve the animals’ habitat.

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“I see 90 per cent of the role of rehabilitation as animal welfare," said Erik Meijaard, an ecologist working with The Nature Conservancy on orangutan conservation in Kalimantan. “But in the past, these programs have done nothing to address the root causes of orangutan decline. In fact, the opposite might happen when displaced orangutans are taken care of by the rehab centres, thereby giving the impression that the centres will help the plantations to solve a problem.”

Said Dave Dellatore, a primatologist with the Sumatran Orangutan Society/Orangutan Information Centre, "Rehabilitation and reintroduction were never intended to be a stand-alone solution, but are rather reactions to the greater problem of shrinking habitat and displacement of individuals from the forest. It's an example of treating the symptom rather than the cause.”

But concerns with reintroduction extend beyond land. Disease is a particular worry. Captive orangutans are more likely to carry disease and parasites due to their living in high density. Furthermore, ex-captives are prone to engage in behaviour that puts them at risk, such as living in close proximity to humans when reintroduced into the wild. For example, mortality rates among baby orangutans visited by throngs of tourists in Sepilok and Bukit Lawang are more than 50 per cent.

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First published in Yale Environment 360 on June 25, 2009.



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About the Author

Rhett Butler is the founder and editor of Mongabay.com, one of the leading sites on the Web covering tropical forests and biodiversity. In previous articles he has written about how the global commodities boom accelerated clearing of the Amazon and about the burgeoning wildlife trade in Laos.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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