Palm oil casualty: Orangutan shot 74 times
BUNGA TANJUNG, Indonesia — The men came at Hope and her baby with spears and guns. But she would not leave. There was no place for her to go.
When the air-gun pellets pierced Hope’s eyes, blinding her, she felt her way up the tree trunks, auburn-furred fingers searching out tropical fruit for sustenance.
By the end, Hope’s torso was slashed with deep lacerations. Multiple bones were broken. Seventy-four pellets were lodged in her body. Her months-old baby had been ripped away.
Hope, who was named at a rehabilitation center, is a Sumatran orangutan — a critically endangered animal that scientists warn could be the first major great ape species to go extinct. As jungle and swamp are cleared for palm oil plantations, orangutans, whose name means “people of the forest” in Malay, are losing the habitat that gives them their identity.
“Twenty thousand hectares are cleared and a couple trees are left and the orangutan looks around and says, ‘What happened to my forest?’ ” said Ian Singleton, the director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program.
Two nations, Indonesia and Malaysia, provide the world with more than 80 percent of the palm oil used in everything from biofuel and cooking oil to lipstick and chocolate. Last September, amid concerns over diminishing habitat for endangered species and dangerous carbon emissions from mass burnings to clear land, Indonesia stopped issuing new licenses for palm oil plantations.
But the global appetite for palm oil is voracious.
“They say there is a moratorium, but I can see with my own eyes that land is being lost every day,” said Krisna, a coordinator for the Human Orangutan Conflict Response Unit, a group based on Sumatra that rescuesinjured orangutans. (Like many Indonesians, Krisna goes by a single name.)
From 1999 to 2015, the orangutan population on the island of Borneo declined by more than 100,000, researchers reported in Current Biology, a scientific journal. There are about 100,000 orangutans remaining on Borneo, according to the World Wildlife Fund. On Sumatra — where more than half of the forest cover has been lost since 1985, according to a coalition of environmental groups called Eyes on the Earth — there are fewer than 14,000 Sumatran orangutans.
That might not sound like a figure heralding certain extinction. But because orangutan mothers let so much time pass between births — eight to nine years are dedicated to raising each child — scientists fear the population is in a death spiral.
When Hope showed up this year on the outskirts of Bunga Tanjung village in Aceh province on Sumatra, some of the earth was smoldering. Neat rows of oil palm seedlings stretched toward the horizon. Hope gobbled fruit from village orchards to survive.
For weeks, villagers repeatedly shot at Hope, trying to scare her away. But she stayed put.
In March, a teenager tried to pry Hope’s baby from her arms. Baby orangutans are often captured for the pet trade. Even though pellets had robbed the mother of her eyesight, Hope struggled to protect her child, leaving scratches on the boy’s arms.
But the teenager did succeed, keeping the baby in a basket outside his home.
By the time forestry officials were alerted to Hope’s presence and mounted a rescue effort, the baby was barely responsive, Krisna said.
With Hope sedated in the back of a vehicle, the baby restored to her embrace, Krisna rushed to Singleton’s rehabilitation center 10 hours away.
The baby died along the way. A Swiss surgeon flew out to operate on Hope.
Hope is recovering in an enclosure. She has learned to accept a papaya or bottle of milk from a keeper.
Nearby, orphaned orangutans whimper and squeak. When Hope hears the babies, she curls into a fetal position and cries out.