As reported by theAssociated Press , a clip of an grownup male person orang smoke a fag in an Indonesian zoo has drawn understandable outrage from plenty . It appears that a passer-by flicked his half - smoked cigarette into the animal ’s enclosure , and , out of wonder , the orangutan pick it up and takes several drag of it – much to the bunch ’s amusement .
Although any mistreatment of animals is clearly a heinous human action , it does n’t help that many featured in this particular menagerie ’s controversies happen to bethreatenedto some degree . Both theBorneanorangutan ( Pongo pygmaeus ) and theSumatranorangutan ( Pongo abelii ) are both list by the International Union for Conservation of Nature ( IUCN ) as “ critically endangered ” , which means they ’re both one gradation away from being out in the state of nature .
Although once spread out across Southeast Asia , they ’re only found today in the state of nature on the Indonesian island of Borneo and Sumatra . According to theWWF , their range has shrunk along with their numbers : In the last 100 year , their populations have contract by roughly four - flock , with most of these belong to to the Bornean specie .
As you ’d bear , home ground passing , poaching , hunting for intellectual nourishment , and other effects of land function changes have activate their precipitous decay . Astudypublished this February estimated that 100,000 Bornean orangutan have go away in the last 16 years alone , something that the investigator framed as “ alarming ” .
As play up by a beautiful piece over onThe Atlantic , there ’s a stack we ’re still discovering about these disappearing brute . Counterintuitively , orangutans areintelligentbut by nature incurious in the wild , but they become far more investigative in captivity . That arguably makes the clipping of the orangutan at Bandung Zoo even more distressing when you consider what they ’re being encourage to be curious about .
As it happens , a separate menagerie in Indonesia featured another Pongo pygmaeus that on a regular basis smoked cigarettes thrown to her by visitor . Eventually , after a ten of smoking learned by mimic human beings , she was moved to a disjoined location in ordering to help oneself herquit her drug abuse . Something alike also occured inMalaysia .
Marison Guciano / Facebook
Activists have channelise out that the installation in question this clock time around , Bandung Zoo , has an already atrocious report . There are various articles dotted around the Web that seem to defend this opinion , with one theme byThe Jakarta Posttelling tales of sun bear begging for intellectual nourishment and elephant kick the bucket after being sick for several Clarence Shepard Day Jr. without being in good order lean to .
Although the decease of the elephant draw a closure of the zoo , it was only irregular .
Achange.org petitionset up some time ago that asks the President of Indonesia to shut down Bandung Zoo has currently reached 996,956 signatures , and looks set to top a million after the latest revelatory video .
