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Orangutans

ramonmercado

ramonmercado

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Boxing orangutans welcomed home

Controversial orangutan boxing was stopped in 2004
Forty-eight orangutans who have spent much of their lives performing boxing matches in a Thai zoo have finally been returned to their native Indonesia.
The wife of the Indonesian president was at the airport to welcome the animals, who were confiscated from Bangkok's Safari World two years ago.

They were due back in September, but a Thai military coup thwarted that plan.

They are now heading to a jungle reserve on the island of Borneo, where they will undergo medical tests.

The orangutans, sporting boxing gloves and brightly-coloured shorts, had been a feature at the Safari World park for decades.


The animals are heading for a reserve in Borneo

But the practice was stopped in 2004 as international pressure mounted, and the animals were confiscated shortly afterwards.

Five other animals belonging to the original troop have remained in Thailand for medical treatment, but are also due to return home.

"We are very happy to get the orangutans back," said the president's wife, Kristiani Yudhoyono. "They belong to our vast nation, therefore we have to take them back to their habitat in a proper way."

Under threat

Experts estimate that there are only 60,000 of the animals left in the wild on Borneo and Sumatra.

Forestry clearance and illegal trading seriously threaten the species, and some estimates suggest those remaining could all but disappear in the course of the next decade.

Forest fires, which some believe are a direct result of clearing the land for oil palm plantations, are also taking their toll.

Earlier this month, animal protection workers said that up to 1,000 orangutans may have died in blazes which have been raging across Borneo for several months.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6171820.stm
Click to expand...
 
People can be and often are horrific. I recall once reading a mortifying story of a female orangutan held captive in a town in Kalimantan and used as a prostitute by a local brothel. She was kept drugged and had her body hair shaved and was forced to service many men each night. Fortunately she was eventually rescued from her living hell. What on Earth possesses someone to consider and then actually having sex with an ape?

Edit: I have just searched to see if I could find out what happened to her. This is from 2015, but her future looks brighter...

Update on Pony the Orangutan
 
Lord Lucan said:
What on Earth possesses someone to consider and then actually having sex with an ape?
Click to expand...
Personally, I would be amazed if it didn't happen millions of times every day.

But if you mean a non-human ape, then, yes, of course, it proves how inhumanly entitled men can be.
 
I wonder if the orangutans had problems with the Scottish accents?

Orangutans can control their voice in a similar way to humans, with new research suggesting they may hold the key to how human speech evolved.

Scientists from the University of St Andrews and Indianapolis Zoo gathered a unique insight into the language similarities while studying great apes. They worked alongside animal care staff at the zoo in the state of Indiana, home to one of the largest groups of orangutans in any American zoo, to analyse 11-year-old Rocky and 36-year-old Knobi.

Both orangutans were given a basic music instrument – a membranophone, such as a kazoo – and used their voice to play it with voluntary control over vocal folds.

https://www.thecanary.co/discovery/...s-could-hold-key-to-how-human-speech-evolved/
 
Lord Lucan said:
People can be and often are horrific. I recall once reading a mortifying story of a female orangutan held captive in a town in Kalimantan and used as a prostitute by a local brothel. She was kept drugged and had her body hair shaved and was forced to service many men each night. Fortunately she was eventually rescued from her living hell. What on Earth possesses someone to consider and then actually having sex with an ape?

Edit: I have just searched to see if I could find out what happened to her. This is from 2015, but her future looks brighter...

Update on Pony the Orangutan
Click to expand...

Then again we haven't seen what the women are like there,
but I will pass, my fellow men do saden me at times.
 
Planet of the Apes is fast approaching.

Orangutans instinctively use hammers to strike and sharp stones to cut, a study has found.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest that two major prerequisites for the emergence of stone tool use – striking with stone hammers and recognising sharp stones as cutting tools – may have existed in our last common ancestor with orangutans, 13 million years ago.

Researchers tested tool making and use in two captive male orangutans that had not previously been trained or exposed to demonstrations of the activities.

Each animal at Kristiansand Zoo in Norway was provided with a concrete hammer, a stone, and two baited puzzle boxes.
They needed to cut through a rope or a silicon skin in order to access a food reward..

The study found the orangutans spontaneously hit the hammer against the walls and floor of their enclosure, but neither directed strikes towards the stone to create a sharp tool.
.
In a second experiment, the orangutans were also given a human-made sharp flint flake, which one orangutan used to cut the silicon skin, solving the puzzle.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-40809936.html
 
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