Increasing Numbers Of Mother Orangutans Shot For Babies As "Pets"

[hatrack]

EDIT

The only surviving great ape outside Africa, the orang-utan is found only on the two islands of Sumatra and Borneo. The Sumatran orang-utan is critically endangered, with only 7,000 left in the wild. Its numbers may have been further reduced by last year's Boxing Day tsunami, which hit the northern tip of Sumatra. With as many as 40,000 left in the wild, the Bornean orang-utan is better off. But wildlife organisations including Traffic and the conservation charity WWF are warning that the illegal pet trade is threatening to cut that population drastically within years.

Borneo, an island divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, is one of the last tropical wildernesses. Much of the interior is untamed jungle where a wealth of wildlife survives. As well as orang-utans, the dense forest is home to gibbons, long-armed apes, elephants, clouded leopards, and proboscis monkeys.

But in recent years, these jungles have come under sustained assault. Forests have been cleared to be sold as timber. Other areas have been cleared by commercial planters to make way for palm oil plantations and other crops. Often the planters start forest fires to clear areas, polluting the rest of Borneo. Private trading in orang-utans is outlawed under international wildlife treaties. Yet large numbers of them have appeared in safari parks in Thailand, Cambodia and peninsular Malaysia. Under Cites, an international treaty to protect wildlife, trade in orang-utans is forbidden except for conservation purposes, and then only through government exchanges between zoos or other conservation centres. But according to Traffic, there is no paperwork for the orang-utans in the Thai, Cambodian and Malaysian safari parks, and there are suspicions they may have been illegally hunted and captured in Borneo.

Orang-utans are not the only ape whose survival is endangered by the pet trade in Borneo. There is a parallel trade in gibbons - a lesser ape that is a more distant relative of man. As with orang-utans, the mother gibbons are killed in order to obtain the young. In Borneo, a baby gibbon can fetch £2, and in Java £41. There are two species of gibbon on Borneo, both of which are believed to be threatened.

The problem has been exacerbated by the lenient treatment meted out to orang-utan and gibbon pet owners caught by the Indonesian authorities, according to Traffic. Those caught with a pet orang-utan are often allowed to hand them over voluntarily to rehabilitation centres and are not prosecuted. Owners have even been given official registration letters for orang-utans - pets that are, in fact, illegal.

EDIT

http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=46062

[blindpig]

1. same as it ever was

Damn near every baby primate to enter the zoo trade in the past 100 years is the result of bush meat hunters who find they can get much more for the babies taken incidental to the hunt than for their meat.Even the sainted Gerald Durrell obtained his chimps in this manner early in his career. Worse still were the unscrupulous animal collectors who might commission the slaughter of groups just to obtain the babies. Today zoos totally reject such methods though a few may still slip through to the corrupt. Research laboratories are still less than scrupulous about where they get their specimens. Internal control in Indonesia may well be impossible without a serious commitment from the central government. There is still demand for pets for the wealthy of the West, and increasingly Asia, though Cites enforcement has at least made some examples of these poachers.

Too, too bad. My reading and experience tell me that these creatures are sentient, thus our treatment of them is even more horrendous than that which we inflict on our other fellow critters.

bp, former zookeeper