Orangutans Treated Poorly In Zoos

Thanks for your never-ending efforts to bring up subjects such as this one on ZooChat, snowleopard!

They may not be popular among all forumsters but I for one certainly appreciates it.
 
what sorts zoos treat them badly in indonesia because most of them over there are rescued and stay over in sanctuarys or come over to monkey world.
 
That article's horrible, poor buggers :(
 
sadly all too common a situation in southeast Asian zoos (and no doubt in other "third-world countries" in the Americas and Africa), not just for orangutans of course but with all the animals in these zoos. There are (a few) good zoos in Asia but the bulk of them are shocking places, adequate at best, and there is little that can be done (or rather, is being done) to remedy them.
Orangutans in public and private Indonesian zoos are being abused to the point where they are eating their own vomit and drinking their own urine, according to conservationists.
The non-governmental Centre for Orangutan Protection (COP) said zookeepers were keeping the endangered apes malnourished so they would be eager to take food from visitors.
"The zoo managements have abandoned the principles of animal welfare," which is to keep animals free of pain, hunger and stress, COP captivity researcher Luki Wardhani told a press conference.
"We documented several stress symptoms and abnormal behavior. They bump their own bodies, vomit and eat it again, urinate and drink their own urine, lick their own nipples and sit without expression."
A COP study of five zoos across Java island found that some of the apes were being denied proper nourishment so they would eat anything tourists tossed into their cages.
"Public feeding should be stopped. The visitors often feed the orangutans unsuitable food and the zoos fail to monitor this," COP captivity program manager Seto Hari Wibowo said.
Too often the orangutans are kept in cages instead of larger enclosures which help reduce their stress levels, the group said.
There are an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 80 percent of which live in Indonesia and 20 percent in Malaysia, according to The Nature Conservancy.
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GorillaBoy said:
what sorts zoos treat them badly in indonesia because most of them over there are rescued and stay over in sanctuarys or come over to monkey world.
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that's just not true. There are literally dozens, potentially hundreds, of small private zoos scattered across Indonesia and a very good proportion of them probably contain orangutans. They are still easily obtained illegally. Many more are kept as pets (ie outside of zoos). I once heard of one that was kept as a household pet until it got too big then it was put into the engine compartment of an old car and fed through a hole. That was an extreme example but it is typical of what happens (a maturing pet gets jammed into a little cage - or simply shot - because the owners don't know what to do with it)
 
Zoos in Borneo

I just finished my study re zoos in Borneo. Worst than in Java. The good news is one of the zoo welcome us to assist them. It has been 9 months. The orangutans relocated from small cages to enclosure.
 
GorillaBoy said:
what sorts zoos treat them badly in indonesia because most of them over there are rescued and stay over in sanctuarys or come over to monkey world.
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None of the orangutans at Monkey World are 'rescued' from Indonesia. They are ex-pets from Taiwan.

Well to be 100% accurate the latest adult orang-utan, who was kept as a pet in South Africa, was born in a zoo in Jakarta.
 
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Treatment of Animals in Indonesian Zoos has always been like this. For comments on the treatment of Orangutans in captivity in South east Asia look no further than Barbara Harrison's 1960's book 'Orangutan'.
 
There seems to be some transigience on orang utans at Jakarta Ragunan Zoo .. The surplus orangs are to be transferred to other zoological collections. Some have already (including Australia and Singapore a.o.).
 
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