The orangutan, one of the most intelligent and largest of all the primates, is facing a desperate extinction process that may culminate in their ultimate disappearance from this planet maybe as early as the end of this decade. Last week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, based in England, declared that orangutans are in critical danger and that the possibility of the species becoming extinct is extremely high and likely.
Orangutans only live in Borneo and on Sumatra among the rain forests. The reddish orange great apes are nearly extinct in the wild as there are only around 7,000 of them left in the forests of Sumatra and Borneo. The major culprits contributing to the potential extinction of the animals is both hunting and the deforestation, the literal burning down, of the rain forests all over these two islands in particular and throughout greater Indonesia in general.
The deforestation occurs every year as millions of acres are burned to revive palm oil plantations and to clear land for more acreage so as more palm oil can be produced. It is the number one export on this side of the world. Palm oil is in great demand all over the world as it exists in just about everything humans eat and use from potato chips to candy to shampoo.
The fires become so gigantic, and out of control, that it regularly threatens the air quality throughout all of the Asian continent. Schools and business are regularly forced to close in such countries as Singapore, Korea, China and Japan because the smoke from the fires creates a poisonous smog that blankets everything and prevents people from seeing even ten feet in front of themselves. Also, according to Greenpeace, there will no longer be any rain forests left in Sumatra and Borneo in less than twenty years at the rate they are being burned to the ground. This is to say nothing about the great quantities of oxygen that forests, in general, produce.
The orangutans depend on the jungle for their very survival. They do not live well outside of it and generally die when the fires drive them out. Those who are not driven out are usually killed in the fires or murdered by hunters for their meat. Baby orangutans have strong grips and travel with their mothers by hanging from their bellies. Quite often, after a hunter has murdered a mother orangutan, the hunter will cut off the baby orangutan’s hands because it refuses to let go of its mother.
Another catastrophic situation facing the orangutan population is that they don’t breed all that often. Females will only get pregnant every 8 years or so and, like humans and the other great apes, rarely gives birth to more than one child.
PHOTO CREDITS: Pixabay / Greenpeace