Orangutans

He was burned alive for doing what any living species does every day: fight to survive. The image of a burned orangutan has become the face of a movement to stop the deforestation of rainforests that are home to one of the most endangered species on the planet – the orangutan. Every day, roughly three football fields-worth of rain forest is destroyed on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, islands that house the endangered Bornean orangutan (roughly 54,000 remain), and the critically...Read Full Story

This handout photo taken on October 14 and released by the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) shows government wildlife and SOCP personnel recovering a fully grown male adult orangutan during a rescue operation in a pocket of Indonesian forest. The roar of chainsaws has replaced birdsong, the once-lush, green jungle scorched to a barren grey. The equivalent of six football pitches of forest is lost every minute in Indonesia. The disappearance of the trees has pushed thousands...Read Full Story

Swaying trees is the way to go, if you are a primate crossing the jungle. Using human street athletes as stand-ins for orangutans, researchers have measured the energy required to navigate a forest using different strategies and found it pays to stay up in the trees. Their work was presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's meeting in Salzburg, Austria on 2 July 2012.To learn about orangutan behaviour, researchers used human parkour athletes as models for orangutans. They measured...Read Full Story

Cruel ape fight club exposed Dressed in garish shorts and boxing gloves, orangutans trade punches and spin-kick each other in a boxing ring.Horrifying footage shows cheering tourists drawn to the barbaric sport at a theme park called Safari World on the outskirts of Bangkok in Thailand.The same company was banned from doing exactly the same thing just six years ago.While an orangutan pretends to be knocked out of the boxing ring, others, dressed in bikinis are trained as round card girls and...Read Full Story

An orangutan works with an iPad at Jungle Island in Miami. Experts who work with primates have been using sign language and other methods to communicate with apes for years, but with technological advancements, researchers are finding new ways to communicate with the animals. (AP Photo/J Pat Carter) The 8-year-old twins love their iPad. They draw, play games and expand their vocabulary. The teenagers like the computer tablets too, but the clan’s elders show no interest. The orangutans at...Read Full Story