A battle has broken out between conservationists over attempts to save the orangutan. The groups are divided over the issue of reintroducing to the wild orphaned animals that are now living in refuges in Borneo and Sumatra.
On one side, experts say such attempts can no longer be considered important and that all efforts must be directed to saving the apes’ last rainforest homes.
“If we cannot protect animals in the wild, there is no point in reintroducing rescued apes to rainforests,” said Ashley Leiman, of the Orangutan Foundation.
But this view is disputed by campaigners who say refuges are today bursting with almost 1,000 orangutans.
“It is a simple matter of welfare,” Cambridge biologist David Chivers said.
“We are keeping these animals in artificial environments, in enclosures. Their rehabilitation should not be sneered at,” Chivers said.
The issue will form the core of the Great Ape Debate to be held at the Linnean Society in London on Thursday when conservationists will argue over the growing controversy surrounding measures to save the orangutan.
At stake is the survival of one of humanity’s closest evolutionary cousins, a creature whose numbers are plummeting alarmingly. In Sumatra there are only 7,000 of the species, Pongo abelii, which is now “critically endangered,” while in Borneo, there are 40,000 members of the Pongo pygmaeus species. Its status is “endangered.”
All great apes — chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans — are suffering from dramatic declines in numbers. Chimps and gorillas are victims of several forms of human activity, including their hunting for bushmeat. However, the orang-utan is affected by a single threat: habitat loss.
Across Borneo and Sumatra, swaths of rainforest are being chopped down for wood and to provide land for farmers wishing to plant oil palm and acacia trees. More than 1 percent of the forest is destroyed every year.
For orangutans, the impact is devastating. Driven from their rainforests, adults are often shot by loggers or farmers when they stray into fields.
Young orangutans are often caught by villagers and taken to a refuge.
Conservationists estimate that there are at least 800 orangutans, most of them young, living in refuges in Borneo and Sumatra. Mary Tibbett, of the World Land Trust, said her group was committed to protecting orangutan communities and was attempting to buy up land around the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary in Borneo to provide homes for them.
“Reintroductions sound fine but carry risks of bringing in diseases that orangutans have picked up from humans or letting loose animals who simply do not have the skills to look after themselves in the wild,” she said.
But Chivers said that, in the long term, keeping orphaned animals in refuges could harm wild populations.
“Keeping hundreds of animals in refuges separated from wild animals means you are isolating a large chunk of the orangutan gene pool. That is ultimately harmful to the species. We need to reintroduce these animals,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS