Just promise me it won’t hurt, nurse!
STRETCHED out serenely on the operating table, this male orangutan’s benign expression is positively human.
Sedated, he seems to be averting his gaze while a medic examines a tender part of his anatomy for airgun pellet wounds – just as you would if a doctor tactfully suggested while giving an injection: ‘You might want to look away now.’
The 14-year-old, about 5ft tall and weighing 10st, was rescued in the Sibolangit district of northern Sumatra earlier this week by workers from Indonesia’s ministry of forestry and the Orangutan Information Centre charity.
They found several metal pellets embedded in his body and took him to the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme’s centre for treatment. He may have been a target for poachers but was more likely shot at by a farmer. Even though Sumatran orangutans are an endangered species, farmers see them as pests because they eat their crops.
Their population is dwindling rapidly as a result of poaching and the accelerating destruction of their forest habitat as it is converted into palm oil plantations.
The SOPC estimates there are only 6,600 left in the wild, putting them on the brink of extinction. A spokesman for the SOPC said: ‘Hunting and killing of orangutans still occurs. In some cases the orangutans are even eaten.
‘But most of the orangutans that are killed die as their forests are being cleared, due to malnutrition and eventual starvation, due to fires used to clear the forest, or killed deliberately – by machetes, fires, beaten with clubs, or simply shot – by farmers when they steal fruit crops.