Clinging to her dying mother, baby orangutan in UK charity’s ‘most harrowing rescue ever’
BARELY alive, this baby orangutan clutches her dying mother, who slumps dazed, beaten, half drowned and bound.
The animals’ only ‘crime’ was a desperate hunt for food after their Indonesian forest habitat was razed.
When the mother and daughter wandered, starving, into a village following a landslide, locals trapped the pair, with the baby still clinging to her mother’s chest.
By the time a team of vets from British charity International Animal Rescue arrived, the villagers had already dragged the mother to a pond where they attempted to drown her.
The vets were sadly unable to save the mother, who they named Lulu, and she died not long after they arrived. But they did manage to save her daughter – in what they described as the most harrowing rescue attempt they have ever undertaken.
Alan Knight, the chief executive of the East Sussex-based charity, said: ‘By the time we arrived, a vet was moved to tears by what she saw.
‘Lulu was still wet, her lungs were full of water and she was already 90 per cent dead. The bond between an orangutan mother and her baby is possibly the strongest in the animal kingdom.
‘The only way you can get a baby away from a mum is to kill her, so it was clear Lulu was holding on just for the sake of her baby.
‘It was just pitiful to see her desperately clutching her mother for comfort. We did everything we possibly could to try to save her, but sadly Lulu died just a few hours later. It was absolutely tragic and so needless, but she became just another victim of the palm oil trade as deforestation is what triggered the landslide.’
Today, the story of her daughter – who has been named Peni by her rescuers – is revealed in the book Orangutan Rescue, written to highlight the plight of the apes who are slaughtered and orphaned every year when their habitat is laid bare to make way for logging, the palm oil industry or mining for coal and bauxite.
But amazingly the rescue story has led to a happy ending – Lulu’s daughter has been rehabilitated by the charity and has forged a friendship with another rescued orangutan, Helen. Eventually, against all the odds, the friends were freed and now live together in a national park, next to the charity’s 250-acre sanctuary in West Kalimantan, Borneo. www.internationalanimalrescue.org/book-orangutan-rescue