INDONESIA: Kick-boxing orangutans arrive in native country as rehabilitation centre in Borneo prepares their long-awaited homecoming

Two years after a controversial raid on Bangkok's Safari World, 48 orangutans being forced to stage a mock kick-boxing bouts at the theme park finally came home to their native Indonesia on Wednesday (November 22). "It's the first time they're flying, maybe not for some who were smuggled in by plane. But they were quite excited but we have a whole programme during the night to keep them busy. If they could not sleep, if they were too stressed, we have given them things to play with, things to eat, things to do . So they are all very well at the moment. Every orangutan at the moment is eating well, is sleeping well, is healthy," said Edwin Wiek, Director of Wildlife Friends of Thailand who accompanied the orangutans on their journey back, shortly after landing in Indonesia's capital Jakarta. The orangutan was flown from Bangkok on an Indonesian C-130 military transport plane to Jakarta, where they were met on arrival by Indonesia's first lady Ani Yudhoyono before taking off again for their final few hours flight to Indonesia's Borneo. For Thai and Indonesian wildlife officials, the homecoming of the apes was a moment they thought would never happen as investigations into the background of the threatened reddish-brown primates became mired in the courts, corruption and delay. Safari World's owners said originally the 115 orangutans seized by wildlife police were the result of a successful domestic breeding programme, even though DNA tests eventually proved many had been bought illegally from Indonesia. The test results set in motion their eventual departure from Thailand, a hub of the international illegal wildlife trade. However, at least 27 of the animals died or disappeared from custody during the slow legal battles involving wildlife activists, the forestry police and the National Parks department. The orangutans had been due to leave in September, but a military coup against Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra averted those carefully laid plans. Indonesian officials said the apes would spend two months in quarantines before undergoing years of rehabilitation programme prior to their release back in the the jungles of Borneo island. "They have been through a lot, from the time they were captured, smuggled abroad, and forced into a cruel livelihood over there -- being trained every day as kick-boxers and had to put on a show in front of an audience, being fed only as reward before the show or practice. It's been a difficult journey for the orangutans -- being a clown or a circus act, and it will take quite an effort to fully rehabilitate them physically as well as psychologically," said Hardi Baktiantoro, Deputy Project Manager of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation at the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation and Reintroduction Centre in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province. "The sick will be confined with the sick first for recovery, while the healthy ones will soon participate in our routine exercises and programmes. Our hope is that within a maximum period of three years they could be returned to their natural habitat," Baktiantoro added. The Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation and Reintroduction Centre is a quarantine, rehabilitation and release facility in Indonesia's Borneo where a three-hectare peat land has been converted to a nature reserve with many fruit trees for the orangutans to learn how to survive in the wild. Three nearby islands are also now the training grounds for better-skilled or older orangutans who has had some forest training around the rehabilitation centre. After a successful period on the islands, they are moved to the final release area deep inside protected forests by helicopter. Fewer than 30,000 orangutans are thought to be left in the jungles of Malaysia and Indonesia, and environmentalists say the species could become extinct in 20 years if the current rate of decline continues.

ITN Source | November 22, 2006

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