Orangutan rehab takes time and money

Bambang M, Contributor, Yogyakarta

Fani, a two-year-old orangutan is a favorite of visitors and staff at the Jogja Animal Rescue Center.

Whenever you come close to her, she will immediately give you a big hug and refuse to let go. But if you carry her to a tree, which is home to orangutans, she will quickly free herself from you and quickly climb up the tree.

Her innocent face and dark eyes make her appear harmless and adorable.

Baby orangutan are so cute that many people like to keep them as pets. These people -- including government officials, in keeping orangutans as pets, are breaking the law that protect the species.

Baby orangutans destined to be pets are forcibly taken from their mothers, causing them trauma, as happened to Fani.

Sugihartono, the director of the center, said Fani always appeared sad whenever she encountered a grown female orangutan at the center.

"Maybe she remembers her mother," he said.

Young orangutans traded in the black market also are traumatized. Hunters usually kill the mothers so they can take the babies.

Willie Smits, founder of the Foundation of Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS), the largest primate rehabilitation center in the world, said that for every baby orangutan that was traded, there were two other babies and three mother orangutans that had been killed.

Based on his research at the animal market at Pasar Pramuka in East Jakarta, he said the three mothers were intentionally killed by poachers, while the two babies would have died in one of several ways: accidentally killed by a stray bullet, being struck by a machete or from injuries sustained from falling from a tree.

They also might die from infections from wounds or because of other diseases.

Before they arrive on the black market, a baby orangutan must make a long journey, crossing the ocean in a small cage.

Sugihartono said the mortality rate for the orangutans at the rehab center was high because many of them had various diseases.

"Of 70 orangutans here only about 20 manage to survive."

Orangutans are vulnerable to diseases. They can be infected by humans because their DNA is a 97 percent match to the DNA of humans.

Sugihartono also said Fani was afraid of fire and smoke, possibly because it reminded her of the forest fires in Kalimantan, where she used to live.

In fact, the recurring fires have made the forests of Kalimantan a killing field for orangutans.

Smits, a tropical forest ecologist and senior adviser to the Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry, estimated that forest fires in Kalimantan from 1997 to 1998 killed about one-third of the orangutans that lived in the forests.

However, Fani and the other orangutans in the care of the Jogja Animal Rescue Center have an opportunity for a new life.

They will be sent to the rehabilitation and reintroduction center in Wanariset Samboja in East Kalimantan, or the Nyaru Menteng orangutan rehabilitation center in Central Kalimantan.

Here, the orangutans will learn how to survive on their own in the wild, until they are ready to be rereleased.

Rehabilitating orangutans who grew up as pets is a challenge. They have become accustomed to human beings and sometimes they act like humans, eating the same food and drinks as us.

Fani, for example, loves to gulp down orange juice.

"Thus, the rehabilitation process for a young orangutan may take seven years," Sugihartono said. "While for an adult orangutan, it is two years."

He added that the cost of this process is between Rp 40 million (US$4,700) and Rp 50 million.

Since it was established in 1991, Wanariset Samboja has rehabilitated about 400 orangutans with a success rate of 70 percent, according to Sugihartono.

The most spectacular rehabilitation process involved Uce, a female orangutan found by Smits as she was gasping for her last breath in the Klandasan market in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan.

The process was recorded in the book Apa yang Dikatakan Orangutan pada Alice: Petualangan di Hutan Hujan Tropis (What Orangutans told Alice: Adventures in a Tropical Rain Forest) by Dale Smith. It was a happy ending for Uce, who was able to return to the wild and even have two babies.

The orangutan rehabilitation process becomes more difficult because their habitat -- the lowland forest of Kalimantan -- is disappearing. The World Bank warned that if the destruction of the forest is not put to a halt, all of the forest in Kalimantan will vanish by 2010.

If that happens, then all of the efforts and the money spent for the rehabilitation of orangutans will have been pointless.

As their habitat shrinks, the orangutan have to compete among themselves for survival. The losers have to find a new place to live, and sometimes they end up in the plantations that have encroached into the forest.

This results in two possibilities: the orangutan will be caught, and then killed or sold by the captors.

Deforestation and the survival of the orangutan has created a vicious cycle in the management of Indonesia's forests. Unfortunately, this problem has never been handled seriously.

Orangutans are caught in this cycle and are waiting for someone to free them from the threat of extinction.