Illegal pet trade persists despite regulations

Illegal pet trade persists despite regulations

TANJUNG PUTING, Central Kalimantan (JP): The existence of
Tanjung Puting and four other rehabilitation centers in Indonesia
and Malaysia is proof enough that the illegal orangutan trade
still thrives.

Indonesia outlawed the capture, ownership or killing of an
orangutan in 1931, but individuals doing exactly those activities
share responsibility for the great ape's status as an endangered
species. People still view orangutans as commodities, either for
economic exchange or as a status symbol pet.

Orangutans begin the long route to captivity when a logger,
hunter or forest dweller meets a mother and baby orangutan in the
forest, according to Willie Smits, director of the Warnariset
Forest rehabilitation center in East Kalimantan and author of a
forthcoming book about orangutans called Illegal Trade.

For the cash-strapped logger or hunter, the orangutan presents
an opportunity to make extra money, and for some the temptation
is enough that they shoot the mother and take the baby to sell.

The local Dayaks also sell the babies, but will eat or sell
the orangutan meat as they have done for centuries, Smits said.
They also carve the skull to pass off to tourists as a bogus
antique human skull.

Although orangutans sell for US$5,000 in Taiwan, the
destination of most orangutan pets, or for as much as $25,000 if
the orangutan gets smuggled all the way to the United States,
local people don't make much money from their find.

Dayaks usually sell the orangutan for Rp 15,000, Smits said.

The new owner is often a restaurant or losmen (small hotel)
owner who in turn, exchanges the orangutan for electronic goods
such as a tape player or small refrigerator from a riverboat
passing through town.

The port-bound orangutan changes hands once again in a bigger
town, and is smuggled over land to a city like Samarinda, where
traders buy the ape for Rp 1 million. These traders ferry the
orangutan to an ocean vessel and sell it for Rp 3 million, and
the price continues to climb with each exchange of the orangutan
en route to a foreign city.

During the 1980s, 1,000 orangutans are believed to have been
smuggled to Taiwan, where owning an orangutan was made
fashionable by a 1986 television program, The Naughty Family.
Taiwan has since prohibited imports of new orangutans and many of
the pets have been repatriated, but the demand continues.

For every orangutan that ends up in captivity, organizations
like the Orangutan Foundation International or Warnariset
estimate that four to eight others die.

If there is any doubt about the scope and continuation of the
orangutan trade, Smits points to Warnariset's log, which shows
that the week before last his "undercover agents" confiscated 13
babies in West Kalimantan, one orangutan in Jakarta, four in
Surabaya, and got leads on four more.

Smits has thousands of agents at work in East Kalimantan,
where all schoolchildren have been enlisted in the cause, and he
often goes undercover posing as a tourist to investigate their
leads.

The biology of the orangutan makes repopulating the species
particularly difficult. As it is usually the female orangutan who
is killed when the baby is snatched, male orangutans now
outnumber females in the wild, Smits said. Females give birth
every eight years, and have at most three or four offspring in
their lifetimes.

"Even for just one orangutan to replace the mother and one to
replace the father takes hundreds of years," Smits said. (Becky
Mowbray)