Two baby orangutans and a lion cub have become the latest victims of China’s contaminated milk crisis.

The animals, at at Hangzhou Zoo near Shanghai, developed kidney stones after being fed milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Chinese media report that the animals had been fed on milk powder made by Sanlu Group for more than a year.

Sanlu Group is at the heart of the milk crisis which has seen four Chinese babies die and another 53,000 fall ill.
Concerned keepers sent the animals for a check up after hearing about the milk contamination and have now stopped feeding with Sanlu milk.

The orangutans and the lion are the only animals to have developed kidney stones and are being treated for the condition.
Officials at the Beijing Zoo and zoos in the other major cities of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xian said they had no cases of animals sickened from milk powder, the Associated Press reported.
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The continued expansion of oil palm plantations will worsen the dual environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, unless rainforests are better protected, warn scientists in the most comprehensive review of the subject to date.

“There has been much debate over the role of palm oil production in tropical deforestation and its impacts on biodiversity,” said Emily Fitzherbert of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and University of East Anglia. “We wanted to put the discussion on a firm scientific footing.”

Palm oil, used in food, cosmetics, biofuels and other products, is now the world’s leading vegetable oil. It is derived from the fruit of the oil palm, grown on more than 50,000-square miles of moist, tropical lowland areas, mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia. These areas, once covered in tropical rainforest, the globe’s richest wildlife habitat on land, are also home to some of the most threatened species on earth.

The review, published September 15 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, singles out deforestation associated with plantation development as by far the biggest ecological impact, but finds that the links between the two are often much more complex than portrayed in the popular press.
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Financial difficulties forced the Pentungsewu Animal Rescue Center (PARC) in Malang, Indonesia, to shut its doors on September 3 and send its rare and endangered animals — including orangutans, siamang, Bornean gibbons, parrot species and Javan ebony langurs — to zoological recreation parks.

PARC was the last center of its kind surviving on funding by donor foundations and the governments.

PARC project manager Iwan Kurniawan said the difficult decision was made because the Gibbon Foundation, a charity organization, had stopped funding the center’s rare species and the central government had cut off funding for its operational activities.

“The rare and endangered species have been handed over to Indonesia Safari Park II in Prigen, Pasuruan, Jatim Recreational Park and Malang Municipal Recreational Park,” Iwan said.

Four other animal rescue centers funded by the Gibbon Foundation and the government have closed down over the past few years.
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