Orangutans must be taken back to nature

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Wed, 11/29/2006 12:48 PM | Opinion

In his letter dated Nov. 24, Joe Spartz expressed his views about the return of 48 orangutans from Thailand to Indonesia, stating among others that ""Realistic thinking should have prevailed over emotional nationalism and other considerations. The question may be asked whether some if not all orangutans would have been better off in Thailand."" and ""Allowing orangutans to live out their remaining lives under proper care in Thailand would have been in their best interest.""

I beg to disagree with Joe Spartz. As we all know, thanks to the thoughtless, egotistical, avaricious actions of us humans, nature is now in a critical state and very much out of balance: forests are disappearing, the weather patterns are changing all over the world, causing much distress, and most of God's creations, rare and beautiful animals He populated the earth with, are disappearing at a fast rate, or are even already extinct.

In their heroic and most praiseworthy struggle to save the orangutans and their natural habitat, as well as other gravely endangered species, Willie Smits, all the dedicated people at Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), and all the world's right-minded humans who think like them and wholeheartedly support them, are battling to return an urgently needed ecological balance to nature and to this world in general. This is very realistic thinking, and for the best interests of the human race in general. For if this planet is devastated and becomes uninhabitable, we humans will be most certainly perish with it.

The return of the 48 orangutans to their home country, the nursing back to health of the sick ones, and the eventual release of them in their natural habitat, might just be a very significant contribution toward restoring that delicate but urgently needed balance in nature. From this point of view, the thousands of United States dollars spent on the orangutans is a mere pittance, compared with the immense fortunes that we, members of the Homo Sapiens race, have robbed from nature and the planet earth in the past centuries.

As for Spartz's personal belief that the orangutans are ""better of in Thailand and receiving proper care"": Genuine proper care could never have resulted in several of the orangutans coming down with hepatitis. In addition, subjecting these intelligent, gentle apes to kick-boxing competitions, an activity for which the creator never intended them to be made, is one of the worst hells for primates that I can imagine.

TAMI KOESTOMO
Bogor, West Java

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