The Pet Tree House - Where Pets Are Family Too : Orangutan The Pet Tree House - Where Pets Are Family Too : Orangutan
Showing posts with label Orangutan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orangutan. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Oregon Zoo Names Its Baby Orangutan After One of Dolly Parton's Most Famous Songs


Dolly Parton is an inspiration to many around the world –– including the keepers at the Oregon Zoo in Portland who have named their new baby orangutan after the singer's big hit "Jolene."

According to zoo, Jolene the orangutan was named for her "flaming locks of auburn hair," which references the Patron's description of the sexy bank teller whose "beauty is beyond compare / with flaming locks of auburn hair."

Baby Jolene was born on April 13 to mother Kitra, the zoo's 20-year-old critically endangered Bornean orangutan. According to Kate Gilmer, who oversees the primate area, zookeepers were unable to determine the newborn's sex for weeks as they gave the mom and baby "plenty of room to bond."

To read more on this story, click here: Oregon Zoo Names Its Baby Orangutan After One of Dolly Parton's Most Famous Songs



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Sunday, August 1, 2021

9 Great Apes At San Diego Zoo Become First Non-Humans To Receive A COVID Vaccine


 

SAN DIEGO (CBS Los Angeles) – Nine great apes at the San Diego Zoo have received a COVID-19 vaccine, it was reported Thursday.

The four orangutans and five bonobos received an experimental vaccine developed by drug maker Zoetis, per CBS News.

The zoo chose to give the great apes the vaccine after several gorillas at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park contracted COVID-19 in early January.

To read more on this story, click here: 9 Great Apes At San Diego Zoo Become First Non-Humans To Receive A COVID Vaccine


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Monday, August 31, 2020

Authorities Rescue a Wild Orangutan Who’d Been Captured and Held Captive by a Group of Local Villagers


Authorities in Borneo, a giant island in Asia, came to the rescue of this wild orangutan who’d been captured and held captive by a group of local villagers. Sadly, crimes against those endangered apes are not uncommon in the region, but there was something quite exceptional about this victim in particular.

Rather than bearing the coloring her species is known for, this orangutan’s hair was blonde and her eyes were a striking shade of blue.

According her new caretakers from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, a medical team determined that the rescued primate has albinism — a rare genetic anomaly affecting her pigmentation.

Fortunately, despite the differences in her appearance, and the fact that she’d been captured, the rescuers are optimistic that the albino orangutan will be able to return to the wild where she belongs:

“We will continue to observe her and conduct routine health tests,” the group wrote online. “She was held captive by local residents for two days and still displays wild behaviors, meaning there is a good chance she could soon be released back to a natural habitat.”

Visit the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation's website  to find out how you can help support rescues like this one.




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Sunday, February 16, 2020

Orangutan Granted 'Personhood' Turns 34, Makes New Friend


WAUCHULA, Fla. (AP) — A orangutan named Sandra, who was granted legal personhood by a judge in Argentina and later found a new home in Florida, celebrated her 34th birthday on Valentine's Day with a special new primate friend.

Patti Ragan, director of the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, says Sandra “has adjusted beautifully to her life at the sanctuary” and has befriended Jethro, a 31-year-old male orangutan.

Prior to coming to Florida, Sandra had lived alone in a Buenos Aires zoo. Sandra was a bit shy when she arrived at the Florida center, which is home to 22 orangutans.

To read more on this story, click here: Orangutan Granted 'Personhood' Turns 34, Makes New Friend


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Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Orangutan Born at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo


For the first time in 25 years, primate staff at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo are celebrating the birth of a male Bornean orangutan. He was born at 8:52 p.m. Sept. 12. Both 19 years old, female Batang and male Kyle bred in January following a breeding recommendation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan (SSP). Primate staff have confirmed the newborn is a male. Animal care staff have observed Batang nursing the infant who has been clinging closely to his mother, and they are cautiously optimistic that the newborn will thrive. The Great Ape House will remain closed to provide Batang a quiet space to bond with her infant.

Animal care staff believe that Batang had successfully conceived Feb. 2, based on a human pregnancy test. They confirmed pregnancy with a subsequent ultrasound. The Zoo announced Batang’s pregnancy June 14 through a Facebook Live broadcast of one of her ultrasounds. Over the past 12 weeks, the Zoo has provided weekly updates on Batang on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #OrangutanStory and will continue to share behind-the-scenes photos and videos as news breaks.

“Each and every birth of a critically endangered species is significant, but it is all the more exciting and this is a historic moment for our Smithsonian’s National Zoo,” said Meredith Bastian, curator of primates and member of the Orangutan SSP Steering Committee. “I am very proud of Batang and my team. Ever since we received the breeding recommendation, they have dedicated themselves to preparing Batang for motherhood. I look forward to watching the infant experience everything for the first time—especially meeting the other orangutans and going outside for the first time with Batang.”

For the past three years, keepers have been acclimating Batang to the experiences of motherhood and training her to care for an infant. Building upon behaviors Batang has learned through routine training sessions, keepers have trained Batang to hold a baby upright, present it to keepers for bottle feedings and place the baby in a specially designed box when asked. This training enables staff to retrieve the infant if medically necessary and evaluate its health in a way that is safe and not stressful for the animals.

To read more on this story, click here: Orangutan Born at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo


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Monday, February 29, 2016

Indonesia: Fire Deliberately Started, Killed Three Female Orangutans, to Clear the Land for Farming



These are the horrific pictures of three female orangutans who were killed in a land fire in Indonesia.

The orangutans, two, twenty-year-olds and a baby orangutan approximately one year old, were caught in the blaze near a protected forest in Bontang City, East Kalimantan.

The founder of the Centre for Orangutan Protection, Hardi Baktiantoro, claims the forest fire was deliberately started to clear the land for farming.

“It is completely illegal to clear forest land by burning it, and in this case the land that was burnt still had three orangutans living there,” he said.

After investigating the death of the orangutans, a team of officers from the Kutai National Park and the Bontang city police buried the three orangutans.

'The bodies of the orangutans were decayed so we buried them soon after the investigation to prevent them from spreading disease,' the head of the Kutai National Park Office, Erly Sukrismanto, said.

The body of the orangutans were discovered after a resident posted a picture of them on Facebook.

Professional photojournalist Yuli Seperi said, “I saw a friend post a status on Facebook about the deaths so I went the location where the three orangutans were.
The deaths made me extremely upset as orangutans are a huge icon to Indonesia.”

The forest fires are claimed to have started around 2:30 p.m., Saturday, February 20.

The founder of the Centre for Orangutan Protection said, “It is not clear why the three orangutans could not escape the fire as they usually can. Perhaps they were afraid of the humans that surrounded the fragmented forest.

The three dead are believed to be a family of all females, two twenty year olds and one baby orangutan around the age of one.”









Officers evacuate the three Orangutan killed by a forest fire at a protected forest on Belimbing village, Indonesia.



The founder of the Centre for Orangutan Protection, Hardi Baktiantoro, claims the forest fire was deliberately started to clear the land for farming.




A team of officers buried the bodies of the three female orangutans to prevent them from spreading disease.





The body of the orangutans were discovered after a resident posted a picture of them on Facebook.




Professional photographer Yuli Seperi said, “The deaths made me extremely upset as orangutans are a huge icon to Indonesia.”




The charred bodies of the orangutan were found in a protected forest in Bontang.




The founder of the Centre for Orangutan Protection said it is not clear why the three orangutans could not escape the fire as they usually can.





The three dead are believed to be a family of all females, two, twenty-year-olds and one baby orangutan approximately one year old.




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Thursday, May 28, 2015

U.S. Court Grants 'Human Rights' to Chimpanzees: Top Naturalist Reveals Why the Animals Are Like Us Than We Think


How would you feel about marrying a chimpanzee? Horror, disgust, revulsion: I mean, they are not human, are they?

So, how would you feel about serving up a chimp for your Sunday dinner? Horror, disgust, revulsion: it would look and feel like cannibalism.

This is not a make-your-mind-up contradiction. The confusion is an unavoidable aspect of the relationship between humans and chimp.

They’re different from us, all right — we know that in our guts. But they’re also the same. They are closer to us than any other non-human life-form on the planet.

Last week, a revolutionary decision was made in a U.S. court: chimpanzees were acknowledged to have rights of their own.

It is the first time legal rights of any kind have ever been accorded to anything other than a human.

The story started in 2013, when an organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court on behalf of four chimps kept for research by Stony Brook University. The eventual conclusion of Justice Barbara Jaffe was that they were not to be treated as property, but as legal persons.

Not as persons with full human rights, but as persons with a right not to be held in captivity and a right not to be owned.

The fact is that chimpanzees really are almost human. It’s a truth that humankind has tried to ignore ever since Charles Darwin declared in 1871 that humans were related to the apes of Africa.

Modern genetic studies have shown that this relationship is much closer than people thought. We have nearly 99 per cent of our genetic material in common.
And if that one-and-a-bit per cent is unquestionably significant, the rest of it takes a fair amount of thinking about. Chimpanzees are more closely related to us than to their — or should it be our — fellow apes, the gorillas and orangutans.

It has been suggested that humans and chimpanzees belong not just in the same family, but in the same genus: in other words, the only correct way to understand the human connection to other species is to accept that humans are a species of chimpanzee . . . or chimpanzees are a species of human.

And if that sounds fantastic, cast your mind back. Some statements made about race — statements that are shocking now — were once accepted as good sense: ‘There is a physical difference between the White and the Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.’ That was Abraham Lincoln in 1858.

One more: ‘The mental constitution of the negro is . . . normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of a servant a dog- like fidelity . . .’ That’s from Encyclopedia Britannica 1911.

The great primatologist Frans de Waal said of us humans: “We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tail-less bodies to our habits and temperament.”
A study published this week in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology said that the many humans who suffer from lower back pain do so because their spines are more like those of chimpanzees than the spines of those people who don’t suffer from back pain.

In other words, some humans are less well adapted to walking upright than others because their spines are ‘statistically indistinguishable’ from those of chimps.

And we find many traits in chimps that are equally uncomfortable.

One chimp learned to use sign language.

Take language. Washoe was a chimpanzee born in West Africa in 1965 and captured for use in the American space program. She was brought up in an American family and taught sign language.

Experiments to teach chimps spoken language had all failed: they don’t have the physical equipment to make sufficiently varied sounds, but they communicate with body language in their wild daily lives.

Washoe acquired a vocabulary of 350 signs, and taught some of them to her adopted chimpanzee son Louis. On seeing a swan, she signed ‘water’ and then ‘bird’.

Washoe put together a near sentence when a doll was put in her drinking mug: “Baby in my cup.” Another time she signed to her teacher: “You me out go.” She received the answer: “OK, but put clothes on.” Washoe immediately put on her jacket.

And, touchingly, one of her regular teachers suffered a miscarriage and was absent for some time. On her return, she signed to Washoe: “My baby died.” Washoe signed back: “Cry.” She then traced the track of a tear on her face. This is an astonishing bit of empathy: chimpanzees don’t weep.

A similar project involving a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky failed to get the same results. It was conducted with clinical rigor, without messy stuff like affection and with many changes of assistants.

A human child needs love to learn, as every parent knows. This failed experiment seems to prove that chimpanzees are no different.

They outperform humans in some computer games, in which snap decision making is required. In problem-solving tests, chimpanzees have invented all kinds of complex ways to find and reach hidden fruit, building towers and creating tools to stretch beyond a barrier. Chimpanzees experience insight: they know what it is to have a ‘eureka moment’.

Desmond Morris, author of the best-selling The Naked Ape, taught a chimp, Congo, to paint. Congo never tried representational art; his style was described as abstract impressionism. But he would carefully balance his paintings, putting, for example, blue on both sides.

He would throw an artistic tantrum if he was told to stop painting before he considered the work finished, and he would refuse to add to a painting he saw as complete. Picasso owned a Congo.

Observations of chimpanzees in the wild, most of them inaugurated by the great anthropologist Jane Goodall, show all kinds of things that humans and chimpanzees have in common.

Chimpanzees make and use tools, they co-operate. They communicate with kisses, embraces, tickling, swaggering and threatening.

She also discovered the most significant thing we have in common: childhood. Chimps and humans spend a long time before taking on the responsibilities (such as breeding) of adult life.

A chimpanzee will spend five years with its mother, suckling and sharing a leafy bed. Orphaned chimps show evidence of clinical depression, and will sometimes be adopted by an older sibling.

Play is essential to humans and chimpanzees: it’s the way we learn skills and behavior that we in turn pass on. In other words, this is culture. Humans and chimpanzees don’t just pass on things through our genes: we also pass things on by showing and learning and showing again in our turn.

Chimpanzees have emotions and express them. They have a sense of self: unlike your dog, they recognize their reflection in a mirror. Its clear chimpanzees know mental as well as physical pain. On what grounds, then, would you deny them the right not to be enslaved or imprisoned?

The moral philosopher Peter Singer suggested human history shows an ever-expanding circle of moral concern. At one stage, people from another tribe were outside that circle.

In recent times, women, as well as people of other races and religions, were excluded from the circle, but now they are all accepted inside most societies in the developed world. The next stage is the beginnings of acceptance of non-human animals into the circle.

Singer uses the term ‘speciesism’. It is the same idea as racism and sexism: the denial of rights and moral concern to a group for no reason beyond the personal convenience of others.

This judgment in New York is a small but meaningful strike against speciesism. Perhaps in time it will acquire the significance of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 or the Equal Pay Act of 1970.

No one will expect change to come with any itching hurry, but it seems that the beginning of change is out there blowing in the wind.

Last week, a revolutionary decision was made in a U.S. court: chimpanzees were acknowledged to have rights of their own. Above Kenuzy, a chimpanzee from Los Angeles, appears to laugh.




A similar project involving a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky failed to teach the animal how to sign language.

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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Our Interest in Unlikely Animal Friendships Reveals Something Surprising About Humankind


YouTube/National Geographic Applying psychology to the topic of animal cuteness might seem like using a hammer on an egg. Can't we agree that something is adorable just because it is?

But as with beauty, cuteness is in the eye of the beholder, and arguments abound as to why (some) infants and (some) animals manage to be so endearing to the human observer.

"Pleasure is not something that natural selection doles out without a reason," writes evolutionary biologist David Barash for Aeon Magazine, "and we would expect that reason to be intimately connected with maximizing fitness."

To read more on this story, click here: Our Interest in Unlikely Animal Friendships Reveals Something Surprising About Humankind FOLLOW US!
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