Sibolangit, SOCP Quarantine Centre, North Sumatra, Indonesia.
Substitution mother Selvi, is teaching Otan, a 3-year-old male confiscated from a home in West Java by JAN (Jakarta Animal Network), to climb trees in the forest school at the SOCP Quarantine Centre. Working together on a daily basis, Selvi and Otan have developed a strong mother/child bond. Like humans, the mother orangutan has to teach her kids everything they need to know to survive on their own. Here at the center, human caregivers take on that maternal role. It is the first step in a teaching, socialization and rehabilitation program with the goal of release at the age of 7 to 8 years old. This corresponds with the age when orangutans naturally leave their parents in the wild.
General caption:
Indonesia’s Sumatran orangutan is under severe threat from the incessant and ongoing depletion and fragmentation of the rainforest. As palm oil and rubber plantations, logging, road construction, mining, hunting and other development continue to proliferate, orangutans are being forced out of their natural rainforest habitat.
Organizations like the OIC (Orangutan Information Centre) and their immediate response team HOCRU (Human Orangutan Conflict Response Unit), rescue orangutans in difficulty (lost, injured, captive…) while the SOCP (Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme) cares for, rehabilitates and resocializes orangutans at their purpose-built medical facility, aiming to reintroduce them into the wild and to create new self-sustaining, genetically viable populations in protected forests.
That we share 97% of our DNA with orangutans seems obvious when you observe their human-like behavior. Today, with just over 14,000 specimens left, the Sumatran orangutan (Pongo Abelii) along with the 800 specimens of the recently discovered Tapanuli species (Pongo tapanuliensis), are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
