A Malaysian orangutan sanctuary where baby apes wear diapers, sleep in cots and are cared for by nurses dressed in masks and starched uniforms has drawn the wrath of environmentalists.
At Orangutan Island in Malaysia’s north, tourists snap photos as they file past large windows looking onto a facility billed as the world’s only rehabilitation and preservation facility for the endangered primates.
Behind the glass, adorable baby orangutans like two-month-old Tuah lie swaddled in nursery sheets and cling to baby rattles.
“He is separated from the mother because his hands got entangled in the mother’s hair and was unable to breastfeed,” said D. Sabapathy, the facility’s chief veterinarian.
Tuah lies calmly in his cot with his eyes wide open and hands across his chest, hooked up to cables monitoring his heart beat and oxygen levels, ignoring the passing parade.
WILD ANIMALS
But the care lavished on the animals, which are fed every two hours by a staff of seven nurses on duty round the clock, is lost on environmentalists, who say this is no way to treat wild animals facing the threat of extinction.
Managers of the 14 hectare island, which is part of a resort hotel development, say they aim to return the animals to their natural jungle habitat, but so far none have been released.
“It is ridiculous to have orangutans in nappies and hand-raised in a nursery. How are they going to reintroduce the primates back in the wild?” senior wildlife veterinarian Roy Sirimanne said.
Sirimanne, who has worked in zoos in Southeast Asia and the Middle East over the past four decades, said baby orangutans need to be with their mothers to learn survival skills.
“First, we need to save their habitat, which is quickly disappearing. And it is the mother that will teach its young for the first four years or more on what to eat and how to look for food,” he said.
“Keeping the orangutans in captivity on an island is not a conservation program. It amounts to desecration [of the species] as it is nearly impossible to reintroduce them back to the forest,” he said.
Experts say there are about 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 80 percent of them in Indonesia and the rest in Malaysia’s eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo island.
FAR FROM HOME
But Orangutan Island is situated in the north of peninsular Malaysia, far from the jungles of Borneo, where the orangutan’s natural habitat is being lost to logging and palm oil plantations.
A 2007 assessment by the UN Environment Program warned that orangutans will be virtually eliminated in the wild within two decades if deforestation continues.
The Malaysian branch of conservation group Friends of the Earth said the best way to save the orangutan is to address rampant poaching and shrinking habitats.
“We are opposed to the orangutan sanctuary. We are opposed to this theme park resort having wildlife in captivity,” Friends of the Earth president Mohamad Idris said.
“Captive-bred orangutans have no natural resistance against diseases, making them susceptible,” he said.
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