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)