FILM TO REVEAL MUTILATION OF ORANG UTANS

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*Wildlife expert's horror at mutilation of orang-utans by rainforest loggers

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Dec 21 2005

 

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Sally Williams, Western Mail

 

 

WELSH wildlife expert Iolo Williams is to reveal the true horrors of the

ill-treatment of orang-utans in some of the most remote jungle in the world.

 

The broadcaster, who lives near Newtown, Powys, has just returned from a

two-week visit to the island of Borneo, south-east Asia, where he took a

film crew from S4C as part of a wildlife series called Illegal Nature (Natur

Anghyfreithlon).

 

Iolo visited a rescue centre near the Kalimantan Rainforest where he saw 400

orang-utans - many of them babies - that had been tortured, abused and

degraded beyond belief.

 

He was shown:

 

Pictures of an orang-utan that had been shaved and physically abused;

 

 

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A male orang-utan that had been covered in petrol and burnt alive while a

crowd of people stood and watched;

 

And he saw several baby orang-utans with one hand missing; they had refused

to let go of their mothers' hands as they were being pulled away and hacked

to death with machetes.

 

Mr Williams said, " What I saw out there was horrendous, it eroded away any

faith I had in human nature.

 

" Loggers kill adult orang-utans, that are close relatives of ours but they

regard them as pests. In fact a sign of the close link is seen in the word

orang-utan - a Malay word meaning, man of the forest.

 

" They want them out of the forest so they take the baby orang-utans from the

mothers to be sold to zoos in Thailand and Europe.

 

" Illegal traders cut down an area of trees the size of Wales every month in

Borneo to meet a demand for oil palm that is used for soap and ice cream.

It's all about money.

 

" They are also clearing areas of jungle to make way for families from

Indonesia to use as farmland. The wildlife is being decimated. "

 

He admits that he was sickened by snapshots he witnessed of what illegal

traders will do to threatened wildlife and their habitat for profit.

 

He added, " This project was the worst one I have ever worked on in all of my

22 years' experience - and I thought I had seen dreadful things while

working for the RSPB. "

 

Mr Williams, who has a wife and two young sons, said he now fears for the

future of wildlife after the visit, that left him in no doubt that man is

abusing life on earth.

 

At least 1,000 orang-utans are disappearing each year and there are now just

over 7,000 remaining in the north Sumatra provinces area, down from tens of

thousands of them in the 1980s.

 

Wild orang-utans are found only in the tropical forests on the islands of

Borneo and Sumatra and all populations are under severe threat.

 

Experts predict that Sumatran orang-utans are likely to be the first great

ape to become extinct in the wild. There are believed to be at least one

third fewer orang-utans in the world now than there were a decade ago.

 

A spokesman from Borneo Orang-utan Survival (BOS) - Indonesia, said, " From

the number of orang-utans confiscated and smuggled in 2003, I estimate that

6,000 were lost from the wild last year. What does this mean? Without

immediate action, the orang-utans are doomed. "

 

Iolo's journey to Indonesia is to be broadcast in autumn 2006