Enveloped in smoke from a forest fire, a female orangutan sits on a railroad track after she was driven from her forest range by clear-cutting and forest fires, which release large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Des Moines, Iowa – October 30, 2007 – At Great Ape Trust of Iowa, respect for the mental abilities of orangutans permeates every activity surrounding their care and welfare. Through its support for the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP), Great Ape Trust hopes to elevate to the same level the standing of orangutans half a world away in Indonesia, one of the last two countries on Earth where the arboreal red apes are still found in the wild.

Orangutans and humans may share 97 percent DNA, but as their habitat becomes increasingly fragmented, conflict builds between orangutans foraging for food and humans who grow crops at the edge of the forest, often with deadly consequences for orangutans.

“They mostly don’t assign them any extra cognitive powers,” said British biologist Dr. Ian Singleton, conservation director for the SOCP. Unless more Indonesians become sensitized to orangutans as sentient beings with complex mental abilities and charismatic personalities, conservation experts’ dire predictions that the Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) will become the first great ape species to go extinct in modern times could come true, he said.

Singleton and one of his colleagues, Asril Abdullah, recently reviewed SOCP’s work in a presentation to Great Ape Trust of Iowa scientists, researchers and other staff. They were in the Midwest to take part in a conference at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo that brought conservationists and zookeepers together for the first time to discuss ways to stop orangutans’ rapid slide to extinction. Great Ape Trust scientists Dr. Rob Shumaker, Dr. Serge Wich and Dr. Karyl Swartz joined Singleton in making presentations at the historic conference.

Abdullah oversees the SOCP’s quarantine facility, an all-purpose medical facility for orangutans confiscated from the illegal pet trade, a byproduct of habitat conversion in Indonesia. He also assists in the repatriation of the species to Bukit Tigapuluh National Park, a forest that hasn’t had any orangutans for more than 150 years, but now has a small population thanks to the reintroduction efforts.

Since 2002, SOCP has quarantined 111 confiscated orangutans. Before they’re released, they go through a battery of medical tests for illnesses, such as tuberculosis and Hepatitis B, and are outfitted with microchips so scientists can track their movements and given tattoos so they can be identified.

Dr. Ian Singleton, left, and Asril Abdullah, one of his colleagues from the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, recently visited Great Ape Trust of Iowa and talked about efforts to reintroduce orangutans in Indonesia and a carbon-exchange program to offset the effects of climate change.

At the quarantine facility, mankind’s inhumanity to their closest living relatives is shockingly apparent. Each year, hundreds of wild orangutans are mercilessly slaughtered – they are buried alive, their hands are severed with machetes, they’re set on fire – and never make it to facilities such as the one the SOCP operates. Those who do make it there are often emaciated and near death. Many are infants or young orangutans who witnessed their mothers’ murders and essentially must “learn what it is to be an orangutan,” Abdullah said.

Infant orangutans cling to their mothers for the first year of their life and remain with them for at least six years until they become adolescents. From their mothers, young orangutans learn how to travel, how to forage for food, when trees bear fruit, how to recognize predators, how to build nests – essentially everything they need to know to survive.

Singleton said the circumstances necessitating the SOCP repatriation program – hunting and the illegal pet trade – are byproducts of the clear-cutting of forests, ultimately for the planting of oil palm, which he calls the single greatest threat to orangutan survival in the wild. Palm oil is used in myriad products and though the trees that produce it can be grown on degraded land, “If you clear forests, you can make money from the sale of timber to invest in the plantation,” he said.

The Indonesian government grants licenses for select logging, but enforcement is lax and select logging is often followed by illegal clear-cutting, Singleton said. He said as few as five companies are responsible for the destruction of forests in Indonesia, “and only one of them has a genuine interest in palm oil production.”

As the palm oil industry continues to ramp up, survival of orangutans – along with gibbons, tigers, elephants and other animals killed by the bulldozers clearing vast sections of forest – isn’t the only issue at stake in Indonesia.

Indonesia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind the United States and China. Its vast peat swamps absorb and harbor large amounts of carbon – more than is emitted by automobiles, aircraft and industries combined, Singleton said – making clear-cutting and draining of those areas for palm oil plantations globally disastrous.

“If you destroy peat land,” he warned, “you are going to kill most of the species on the planet.”

Oil palm can be grown on degraded land, but often the rain forest is sacrificed to help finance the sprawling plantations being developed to meet increased demand for the crop.

Singleton is using the bully pulpit of the SOCP to lobby for a carbon-exchange program that could provide economic alternatives to large-scale oil palm plantations. “If we can trade the carbon,” Singleton said, “it can be as economically beneficial as palm oil. The peat lands are worth more under carbon trade than palm oil trade.”

He said the steps Indonesia takes to mitigate the effects of climate change are important worldwide, not only for the survival of great apes, but vast numbers of other species, including homo sapiens.

Whether there’s room for optimism “depends on the political will of the local government,” Singleton said. The best response has occurred in Aceh, Sumatra’s northern-most province, and home to most of the island’s estimated 6,700 orangutans. The government there has begun enforcing its moratorium on logging, and has also made commitments to mitigate climate change through the adoption of carbon-trading strategies that Singleton and others advocate.

Great Ape Trust Background

Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a scientific research facility in southeast Des Moines dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence.  When completed, Great Ape Trust will be the largest great ape facility in North America and one of the first worldwide to include all four types of great ape – bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – for noninvasive interdisciplinary studies of their cognitive and communicative capabilities.

For more information, contact:
Al Setka
Director of Communications
Great Ape Trust of Iowa
4200 S.E. 44th Avenue
Des Moines, IA 50320
515.243-3580
515.720.7430 (cell)
asetka@greatapetrust.org

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