Childless couples eye orang utans

Childless couples eye orang utans

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP): Baby orang utans are being abducted and reared by desperate childless couples in Malaysia, a newspaper reported here yesterday.

The couples shave the body hair off the orang utans to make them look more human, Edwin Bosi, an officer at the Sepilok Orang Utan rehabilitation center in eastern Sabah state, told The Star daily.

The wild animals were brought up thinking they were humans and later abused when they began to wreak havoc in the homes, Bosi said.

"The problem usually begins when an orang utan grows older. At that time, it will bite and becomes too active for human care," he said.

"Sometimes out of irritation, these couples or their family members abuse and hack them to death."

Bosie cited one case of a family that took an orang utan as their "youngest child", named him Ramadhan, and kept him dressed in a T-shirt and nappies. Ramadhan ate human food and slept in an air-conditioned room.

"But when he turned three, it was too much to handle. So the family returned it to our center for rehabilitation. Ramadhan cried for many days, refusing to eat," Bosi said.

An average of three or four cases a month were reported of people keeping the apes illegally and abusing them, and rangers had to be sent to the plantations to bring them back to the center, he said.

The Orang utan is a protected species under the Fauna Conservation Ordinance 1963 and Bosi warned that those who hunt them are liable to a five-year jail term upon conviction.

For other general offenses against the orang utan, those found guilty face a maximum fine of 5,000 ringgit (2,000 dollars) and a year's jail.

The project director for the World Wide Fund for Nature in Sabah, Junaidi Payne, was reported by The Star saying such cases were new to him.

"We will assist the state government to conserve sufficient protected areas and ensure the animals are retained," Payne said.

"Orang utans are among the most intelligent of wild primates. Keeping them in captivity is certainly not the proper thing to do."

Officials said it was an irony that while lonely childless couples turned to the apes out of desperation, there were still people who dumped babies born out of wedlock.

A total of 276 abandoned babies have been reported in the past five years.