Good morning children, are we sitting comfortably?

Now then children I hope you are all sitting comfortably, pencils at the ready as it is time for a short lecture…..and no nodding off at the back.

I’ll start with a quick history of the Matang Wildlife Centre.  It was set up by the government about 10 years ago as a centre of excellence, somewhere that could rehabilitate orangutan, sun-bear and other endangered species before releasing them back into the wild.   

Interesting fact, very sad but interesting: There is not a single vet in the entire of Sarawak, Malaysia’s largest state with a population of over 2 million people, who is qualified to work with orangutan or sun-bear.  The centre does not have a vet, if an animal gets ill they take them to a regular cat and dog vet in Kuching.  Currently they are waiting for a training vets to graduate after which hopefully they can employ someone and then bring an experienced vet over from abroad to mentor them for a year or so.

There is currently near to zero knowledge about the rehabilitation of sun-bear.  Nobody is really working on it, currently the centre has a waiting list of about 200 sun-bear that people want them to take.  Everything that Matang is doing with the bears is to be published as a scientific paper, essentially to PHD standard.  When they are young sun-bears are very big in the pet trade industry.  Unfortunately like many animals when they grow older they turn wild, and a sun-bears bite is much worse than its bark!  One of our bears at Matang, gummy-bear, had all of his teeth pulled out with a pair of pliers when he was younger so his owner could keep him longer.  Luckily, they decided not to pull his claws out as often happens.  Gummy bear cannot now go back into the wild.

Guess which country has the highest density of orangutan, Borneo, Indonesia? Nope, it is Taiwan.  There used to be a soap opera with an orangutan in it, the pet trade went through the roof.  As they got bigger they got dumped into parks and what not, remember that orangutan do not live in Taiwan, they are nothing like indigenous to the area.  The pet trade luckily as calmed down, and all the zoos/centres are trying to send them back to Borneo to places like Matang to be rehabilitated, but the centre is not quite ready and the paperwork/bureaucracy is a nightmare.  In time it will happen.

In the UK, if you know where to look and have the inclination, you can buy a pet orangutan for $25,000 (pounds not dollars).  Over here a baby orangutan can be yours for about $1000, generally from Kalimantan in Indonesia.  If you can get to the source, and nobody can, orangutans cost $100. Most figures put it at about 1000 animals going to the market every year.  The only way to get to the babies is to kill the mothers, who aren’t worth much, if anything.  About 2 out of every 3 babies that are taken from their mothers and into captivity die quite quickly.  So for those 1000 orangutan that are on the market, the real figure of deaths could be as high as 4000-5000 orangutan.

I think I’ll leave it there for now.

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