Orangutans

“Borneo’s forest-to-plantation ratio has plummeted in recent decades. Satellite data show that the island’s forest cover dwindled from 76 percent to a mere 28 percent between 1973 and 2010. Deforestation has only accelerated since then, especially in 2015, when fires smoldered across 1.3 million hectares of peatland for months on end. From an ape’s point of view, the plantation vista presents an uninhabitable hellscape. From an industry standpoint, it is a prospect of burgeoning revenue. Half of the vegetable oil consumed around the world comes from oil palms. According to data from USDA and the World Bank, the global market for palm oil and palm kernels is around $47 billion. But can the industry maintain that profitability if consumers come to associate palm oil with the rape of the jungle and the imminent extinction of its iconic orangutans?”

“Conservative data suggests that the illegal trade in great apes is widespread. Over the past seven years, a minimum of . . . 1,019 orangutans are documented to have been captured from the wild for illegal trade. These numbers are based on figures from 2005 to 2011 that comprise confiscation and arrival rates of orphans at sanctuaries . . . Many studies suggest that far more apes are either killed during the hunt or die in captivity than are ever confiscated, and law enforcement and customs officials admit that only a fraction of any contraband is ever seized.”

“The importance of conservation could hardly be more evident anywhere than in the Malaysian state of Sabah, on the northeastern tip of Borneo. Sabah is boom country, and the boom is based on the rapid depletion of the state’s vast timber resources . . . ‘The key to any long-term conservation program is education,’ Mr. Mitchell said, holding a small orangutan by its hand, like a toddler. ‘It’s only the local population who will save their wildlife. Experts cannot,’ he said. He believes that the forestry station in a reserve outside this principal city on Sabah’s east coast contains an ideal drawing card to become a nature education center. The magnet is an orangutan rehabilitation center, the first of its kind in Borneo and Sumatra . . . Orangutan means ‘man of the forest’ in the Malay language. The center houses at least 15 apes at a time. Many are infants who were sold as pets after their mothers were killed by loggers.”

“When the first Europeans reached Indonesia the orang-utan’s range was already reduced to Borneo and Sumatra. Man’s predation may have been a cause of this, but we do not know. What is certain, however, is that Europeans were responsible for the slaughter that has so reduced their numbers in the last two hundred years. Orang-utans were killed for sport, because they were considered a dangerous menace, and in the name of science; they were killed in the process of obtaining young ones as pets, and killed and trapped in collecting for zoos. Now their habitat, the jungle, is being cut down for its valuable timber. Present numbers have been estimated at a mere 5,000.”

“Nature conservation in general and orangutan protection in particular were poorly equipped to withstand the quarter century of military and political turmoil that beset the lands inhabited by the red ape from 1942. For twenty-five years from the Japanese occupation of Sumatra and Borneo during the Second World War until the second half of the 1960s, little was done to protect the orangutan. After the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, the Dutch colonial government had at best weak control of most of the orangutan habitat areas in Borneo, while the smaller orangutan areas in Sumatra were largely under the control of regular and irregular forces loyal to the Indonesian Republic . . .”

“It took fifteen years from the 1909 ordinance for the orangutan to be deemed preservation- worthy by the colonial government. In the 1924 hunting ordinance for colonial Indonesia, orangutans were finally included on the list of animals it was forbidden to hunt, and in the following year they were protected from killing in general.”

“Considering its size, the Maias [Orangutan] is remarkably inconspicuous in its natural surroundings. Until men can acquire arboreal habits it seems likely that the domestic arrangements of the ape will remain undiscovered.”

“It s very remarkable that an animal so large, so peculiar, and of such a high type of form as the Orang-utan, should be confined to so limited a district — to two islands, and those almost the last inhabited by the two higher Mammalia; for, eastward of Borneo and Java, the Quadrumania, Ruminants, Carnivora, and many other groups of Mammalia, diminish rapidly, and soon disappear.”

“The Orang-Outang is too wonderful preparing and drinking his tea, doing everything by word of command. He is frightful & painfully and disagreeably human”.

“One of them finally seeing the creature up a large tree had fetched the others and they had felled the smaller trees all around, leaving the bigger tree with the Maias standing, so that it could not jump or spring on to the smaller trees and thus escape them again. They then formed themselves into a circle, leaving only two men to fell the tree. It fell, and with it the Maias, which was stunned, and so they were able to capture and kill it.”

“From the enquiries I made, I may venture to say that he is no longer to be seen in the peninsula on this side of the Ganges; and, likewise, that he is become very rare in the countries where he still propagates. Has this race then been confounded with others, destroyed by them, or devoured by wild beasts?”

“Now notwithstanding our Pygmie does so much resemble a Man in many of its parts more than any of the Ape-kind, or any other animal in the world I know of . . . some Sea-Captains and Merchants who came to my House to see it, assured me, that they had seen great many of them in Borneo, Sumatra, and other Parts”

“On the island of Ramni [Sumatra] there are found many remarkable things. Ibn al-Faqih tells us that there live on the island male and female human beings who go naked and barefoot and whose language is unknown. They dwell in the treetops; they have hair on their bodies which covers their pudenda. They are countless in number; they feed on the fruits of the trees, and shun the vicinity of man. If one of them is brought to places inhabited by man it does not stay there but runs away to the jungle.”

“Twenty-five thousand years ago, orangutans were to be found in moist rain forest in the western Indonesian islands, over much of the Southeast Asian peninsula, and in adjacent regions in what is now eastern India and southern China. The sharp contraction of the range of the orangutan to the island of Borneo and a small area in Sumatra appears to be connected with habitat loss and probably also with hunting . . . The dynamics and timing of extinction in China and mainland Southeast Asia are even less certain, though there have been persistent hints that orangutans or a related species of great ape may have survived into historical times. In the fourth century AD, the Chinese painter Jiang Guan prepared a series of illustrations of Chinese fauna that were used to illustrate the Erya , the oldest Chinese dictionary, which dated from the third century bc. The Erya describes two animals, one called the xing xing, which is the contemporary Chinese term for a great ape, the other the fei fei, a term used today for the baboon. The xing xing was said to have ‘a human face and the body of a pig, and it is able to speak. At present it is found in Chiao-chi [Jiaozhi, i.e., Vietnam] and the Fêng-hsi district [eastern Guangdong] . . . Its call resembles the crying of a small child.’ The same commentary describes the fei fei as having ‘a human face, with long lips; its body is black, with hair hanging down to its heels.’”