Indonesians killed 750 orangutans in year

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Villagers living on the Indonesian side of Borneo killed at least 750 endangered orangutans over a yearlong period, some to protect crops from being raided and others for their meat, a new survey shows.

Such practices, never before quantified, are now believed to pose a more serious threat to the existence of the red apes than previously thought, Erik Meijaard, the main author of the report that appeared in the journal PLoSOne, said today.

Indonesia – home to 90 percent of the orangutans left in the wild – was blanketed with plush rain forests less than 50 years ago, but half those trees have since been cleared in the rush to supply the world with timber, pulp, paper and, more recently, palm oil.

As a result, most of the remaining 50,000 to 60,000 apes live in scattered, degraded forests, putting them in frequent, and often deadly, conflict with humans.

“But our surveys also indicate that killing of orangutans is happening deep inside forested areas, where orangutans are hunted just like any other species,” Meijaard said. The Nature Conservancy and 19 other private organizations, including the WWF, carried out the survey to get a better understanding of orangutan killings and their underlying causes.

They interviewed 6,983 people in 687 villages in three provinces from April 2008 to September 2009.

The authors were quick to stress, however, that the people who admitted to killing orangutans said they’d only done so once or twice over the course of their lives.