Orangutan
Prosperity
Project
Why Are Orangutans in Danger?
The main threat to orangutans is the destruction of their habitat, primarily through deforestation. This deforestation occurs for several reasons:
Palm Oil Plantations
Poaching
Fires
Logging and Mining
Palm oil is a substance harvested from the palm oil tree used in the production of many consumer goods. In fact, roughly 50% of all supermarket goods include palm oil as an ingredient. As a result, demand for palm oil is incredibly high and growing even higher.
To meet this demand, the palm oil industry is converting the forests of Malaysia and Indonesia into huge plantations by cutting down trees and setting fires to clear the reamaining brush. In doing so, the industry disrupts the homes of all animals present, either killing them or forcing them to relocate.
Since production of palm oil is such an integral part of the Malaysian and Indonesian economies, these countries' governments are willing to concede large tracts of land for the creation of new plantations, even when those lands are protected as national parks.
A significant amount of deforestation also occurs as a result of logging and mining operations. Both industries result in the clearing of huge regions of forest and the destruction of oranguans' habitat. Additionally, much of the logging is conducted unsustainably, meaning that no seeds are planted to help replace the trees that are cut down.
Due to ambiguous land boundaries and ineffective boundary patrol, these operations often spill into protected areas without significant penalty.
Historically, orangutans have been hunted for food by the indigenous people of Sumatra and Borneo. This danger has become greatly reduced in recent years, though possibly only because orangutans are so difficult to find.
More commonly, orangutans are killed as pests by local farmers for feeding on crops.
Fires, often used in the process of land clearing for palm oil plantations and other farms, can contribute to unintended large-scale forest fires. The destruction caused by these fires is heightened by dry weather conditions, which allow the fires to burn longer and travel further.
During the years 1997 and 1998, forest fires destroyed over eighteen thousand square miles of forest in Indonesia, aided by the droughts caused by a severe El Niño phenomenon. It is estimated that these fires killed approximately a third of the orangutan population at the time.
Unfortunately, orangutans are sometimes killed directly at the hands of humans.
Pet Trade
Baby orangutans are often captured and sold illegally as pets. Since young orangutans are dependant on their mothers for the first few years of their lives, the capture of these young orangutans involves killing their mothers. The elimination of mature females can have devastating effects on the population of orangutans, a species already quite slow to reproduce. Furthermore, captured infants only serve as good pets for a few years before maturing into strong and wild animals.
Sources:
www.orangutan.com/threats-to-orangutans/
wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/great_apes/orangutans/
