Orangutans Still Being Killed In Borneo Despite Conservation Efforts
Direct killings of these endangered animals are feared to cause local extinctions, with potentially less than 100,000 left in the wild.
Nearly a third of Indonesian villages on the island of Borneo have reported local killings of orangutans in the last ten years, reveals a new study.
The findings confirm that many orangutans are still being killed in the region, despite major conservation efforts.
Orangutans have full protection under Indonesian law, and more than $1 billion of conservation efforts have been spent on protecting the species in the last two decades.
But now one of the first major field studies in more than 10 years on the status of orangutan killings is showing that more needs to be done to slow and stop the extinction of the species.
Published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, the study’s researchers conducted over 400 interviews in 79 villages across the Indonesian region of Kalimantan in 2020 and 2021.
“We found that killing does seem to still be happening and a lot of it had happened in the previous five years,” Emily Massingham, a researcher from the University of Queensland, and who led the study, explained to The Guardian. “I was shocked to see 30 percent of villages had evidence of killing in the last five to 10 years.”
Orangutan killings are particularly devastating for populations as the animals are slow-breeding. The interval between births is approximately eight years, making new births infrequent.
Native to Indonesia, all three species of orangutan are listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. The study focused solely on the Bornean orangutan.
Other findings in the study suggested that conservation efforts in the region were not having an impact on reducing local killings of orangutans. The researchers note that as conservation work is broad and varied, this is not to say that such work has not been successful, but rather that more work is needed to specifically target the practice of orangutan killings.
An Endangered Species at Risk
Research suggests that orangutan populations have decreased by around 50 percent in the last decade. Population estimates project that less than 100,000 orangutans are left in the wild, and the number may be closer to around 60,000.
Conservation experts say orangutans are at risk from several threats. The animals have experienced a rapid loss of habitat from human development and deforestation in the last few decades.
They have also faced illegal hunting and poaching, which is often driven by the illegal wildlife trade. Typically, adult orangutans are shot and killed, and then their infants taken to be sold into the exotic pet trade or to zoos.
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