Rob Shumaker, a member of the Orangutan Conservancy’s Board of Directors, almost single-handedly shut down the use of orangutans in the entertainment industry, a feat akin to ‘brokering peace talks.’ Here’s how he did it.

Rob Shumaker, generally a confident kind of guy, was nervous. He was about to cold-call the owners of wildlife animals used in movies and TV shows and ask them to shutter the portion of their business that supplied orangutans.

That’s not all. He also wanted them to donate the apes to Great Ape Trust of Iowa.

“I had heard through the grapevine that they might be willing to give up their orangutans,” says Shumaker, Ph.D., director of the orangutan research program at Great Ape Trust, a scientific research facility in Des Moines dedicated to the study of primate intelligence. “I thought, ‘What the heck. I might as well ask. I’ll just call them.’

“But then I got cold feet.”

His trepidation is understandable. After all, Shumaker had long been a vocal opponent of using great apes in entertainment and a passionate advocate of animal welfare. Overall, the relationship between the conservation community and private great ape owners had always been strained and frequently hostile.

But Shumaker didn’t let his jitters stop him. The result? Last summer and fall – less than a year after the initial contact – three of the orangutans owned by Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife arrived at their new home at Great Ape Trust, whose mission includes providing sanctuary to great apes. The remaining five animals are expected to arrive this spring. Because the Los Angeles-based company was the sole supplier of orangutans on the West Coast, the owners’ decision to donate the apes draws the curtain on orangutans in Hollywood entertainment.
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Sir David Attenborough of the United Kingdom has called for greater protection for the wild habitat of orangutans amid fears “emotional” television programs about rescued apes have failed to raise awareness of the need to protect the rainforests where the animals live.

Programs like the Animal Planet’s “Orangutan Diary,” following the lives of orphaned and rescued orangutans at a refuge centre in Borneo, have recently raised awareness of rehabilitation schemes helping the great ape be reintroduced into the wild.

However, conservationists argue the money would be better spent protecting the rainforests where the orangutans live.

Even if the animals are rescued many do not survive in the wild and can even spread disease in the existing population.

At a debate at the Linnaean Society of London on April 30, conservationists will argue over the best way to save the orangutan. The great ape, which is one of man’s closest evolutionary cousins, could be extinct in ten years largely due deforestation because of demand for palm oil and timber in Indonesia.
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Erik Meijaard,a senior ecologist for The Nature Conservancy in Indonesia, expands on the recent surveys that led him to announce an heretofore undiscovered population of orangutans living in eastern Borneo.

Finding a new population of any species is good news in conservation. But finding a hitherto undiscovered population of orangutans is really exciting. And we did just that.

In December 2008, we found a significant population of Bornean orangutans. This is some welcome news on a generally gloomy conservation agenda.

Orangutans are among the rarest primates on Earth. Populations are plummeting under the various pressures on their forest habitats. An increasing demand for timber, palm oil, coal and other things desired by the world’s growing human population makes life for orangutans very difficult these days.

So, we all got pretty excited when our field team came back from a survey in a really inaccessible part of Borneo with photos and videos of orangutans. They had traveled to the heart of a 2-million-acre forest area situated in the rugged Sangkulirang limestone mountains in East Kalimantan Province.
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Conservationists have discovered a new population of orangutans in a remote, mountainous corner of Indonesia — perhaps as many as 2,000 — giving a rare boost to one of the world’s most endangered great apes.

A team surveying forests nestled between jagged, limestone cliffs on the eastern edge of Borneo island counted 219 orangutan nests, indicating a “substantial” number of the animals, said Erik Meijaard, a senior ecologist at the U.S.-based The Nature Conservancy.

“We can’t say for sure how many,” he said, but even the most cautious estimate would indicate “several hundred at least, maybe 1,000 or 2,000 even.”

The team also encountered an adult male, which angrily threw branches as they tried to take photos, and a mother and child.

There are an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 90 percent of them in Indonesia and the rest in neighboring Malaysia.

The countries are the world’s top producers of palm oil, used in food, cosmetics and to meet growing demands for “clean-burning” fuels in the U.S. and Europe. Rain forests, where the solitary animals spend almost all of their time, have been clear-cut and burned at alarming rates to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations.

The steep topography, poor soil and general inaccessibility of the rugged limestone mountains appear to have shielded the area from development, at least for now, said Meijaard. Its trees include those highly sought after for commercial timber.
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