Orangutan shot 74 times is on mend
An orangutan that lost its baby and its eyesight after being shot by plantation workers in Indonesia is recovering after surgery.
The injured ape, which has been named Hope, was found still holding its onemonth-old baby after being attacked in the province of Aceh on Sumatra. Vets removed 74 air gun pellets from its body and treated injuries caused by knives.
‘‘Hope is getting better, [and] she’s starting to eat,’’ said Sapto Aji Prabowo, head of the Aceh Natural Resources Conservation Agency, which was tipped off about the injured animal in Bunga Tanjung village near the town of Subulussalam.
The baby orangutan died of malnutrition shortly after being rescued because its mother had been unable to feed it during a three-day pursuit by hunters. ‘‘The mother couldn’t find food for her baby as she was already injured after the chase,’’ one of the vets, Yenny Saraswati, of the Sustainable Ecosystem Foundation in the city of Medan, said. Sapto said: ‘‘The orangutans came to a villager’s plantation and were considered threats by the owner who then attempted to expel the animals.’’
Research last year suggested that more than half the orangutans on the neighbouring island of Borneo have been lost since 1999, a total of nearly 150,000 animals.
About 54,000 are left on Borneo, with 15,000 more on Sumatra, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The main reason for the decline has been the destruction of the apes’ jungle habitat for commercial logging, palm oil plantations and mining.
The orangutan conservation programme said that use of readily available air guns to shoot wildlife was a big problem in Indonesia. It said that in the past ten years it had treated more than 15 orangutans with a total of nearly 500 air gun pellets in their bodies. – The Times