Monkey business we don’t need

IT was the height of the Communist insurgency and Confrontation, weeks before Sarawak’s Independence Day in 1963. And it was a dark evening when Sarawak Special Branch officer Assistant Commissioner Datuk Lawrence Lim arrived to visit an Iban longhouse.

Lim and his group of officers were met by a hairy man wearing black pants and a hat who helped carry their bags to the longhouse.

The man prepared a bath for the group – bringing them a pail of water and soap – and then joined them in the festivities. The man danced very well, Lim wrote later.

Tired, they all slept in the communal area. As he slept, Lim felt a cold and hairy hand on him.

“I jumped up thinking a ghost was holding my hand and cried out: ‘Apa itu? Apa itu?’ (What’s that? What’s that?)”

It was only then that Lim realised that the hairy man he had called Unka – because that was all he would say – was actually an orang utan, and not a fellow villager.

Orang utan can be almost human, laughs James Ritchie, a retired journalist who has long been associated with Sarawak wildlife conservation.

Unka, for one, was always part of the community and even saved the village once, going to a church on a hill, ringing the gongs to awaken everyone and waving a light to get the villagers to higher ground as floods hit the area.

“The floodwaters rose to 60 feet,” Lim wrote.

Unka had been a fixture in that church, sweeping the floor and arranging chairs and tables inside the chapel. He believed he was human like everyone around him. Ritchie, too, swears that all orang utan are nearly human.

Scientists agree. Recently, an orang utan in Indonesia was seen treating a wound it had suffered with medicine produced from a tropical plant. They are that intelligent.

They share 97% of our DNA and, according to Dutch microbiologist Willie Smits, an orang utan baby is just like a human baby – helpless. They learn from their mothers, and they feel like us – they have empathy, joy and grief.

Which is why a plan to use the orang utan as a product for diplomacy – what a minister called “orang utan diplomacy” along the lines of China’s panda diplomacy – sounds abhorrent.

The government believes that sending orang utan to other countries will convince them about our conservation efforts and silence those who think our oil palm plantations are endangering the animals – and that it would portray the country as a sustainable palm oil producer.

I beg to disagree. In fact, I believe that it could be the other way round. Any such “trading” of orang utan will only make others believe we are exploiting these gentle animals that live peacefully in the jungle.

Ritchie goes a step further. It will almost be like the slave trade of old, he says. They are not “toys” to be gifted to others.

He should know. He even has an orang utan named after him. A baby orang utan he rescued grew up into alpha male called “King Ritchie”.

Pandas are one thing, but orang utan are another.

Pandas can live in an air-conditioned enclosure, but orang utan, like the name suggests, are “people of the jungle”. They need vast spaces to live, forage and move around. They are individuals who like their own space. They cannot – must not – be caged.

Already, they are an endangered species. There are only about 100,000 Bornean orang utan and 7,500 critically endangered Sumatran orang utan in the world.

The Lanjak Entimau wildlife sanctuary in the Sarawak-Kalimantan border, for instance, spans about 1,870 sq km or half a million acres. It houses about 30,000 orang utan, with each having about 6ha of space.

How much space can any host country give the animals? Would the primate fit in?

We are talking about the European Union, India or China – how do these countries prepare a habitat for these intelligent animals?

It’s not as simple as building an air-conditioned enclosure in a zoo.

Orang utan diplomacy is not really a new idea. I remember back in the 1970s and 1980s, Indonesia sent two of the primates to Penang called Inpu and Inpi (for Indonesia and Pulau Pinang).

They were kept in a large cage in the Botanic Gardens, and in terrible conditions. Visitors to the Gardens gave them cigarettes and canned drinks, including beer. Trapped behind the metal bars in an area no larger than a regular house, they often turned violent, rattling the cage.

A friend, who was one of the keepers, was once attacked by the orang utan. Sadly, I believe, one of the primates died in captivity and the other was sent elsewhere.

There is now a different orang utan sanctuary, a 14ha island in Bukit Merah, Perak, that has about 20 of the primates. It’s far better than cages but it is still too small for that many animals – they get just over an acre each. Wide open jungles are still the best place for these animals.

The World Wildlife Fund thinks so too. It feels that instead of sending our orang utan abroad, we should be improving their habitat to show the world that we care.

It says forest areas near plantations must be conserved with fruit trees planted to provide food for orang utan. Also, wildlife corridors are needed to connect forest patches now separated by plantations so the primates can cross from one place to another to breed.

Inbreeding within one patch of forest could also lead to their extinction. Human beings, WWF says, should stay as far away from the orang utan, allowing them to live in their own pristine jungles, without the diseases we may transmit to them.

I say politicians should stay even farther away from the orang utan. We may want diplomacy, but we don’t need the kind of monkey business that’s now being suggested.