A rare
orangutan has been blinded after being shot 74 times by a pellet gun as she
tried to protect her four-week-old baby.
The incident
occurred as cruel hunters tried to poach the orangutan and her infant, leaving
the mother with four pellets in her left eye and two in her right. Unable to
feed her baby as a result of the injuries, the young orangutan sadly became
malnourished and died from an infection.
A team of
rescuers managed to save the mother though, treating her open wounds and
performing surgery to fix her broken collarbone. According to vet Yenny
Saraswati, the animal – which rescuers named Hope – also had a number of
injuries believed to have been deliberately caused by sharp objects.
According to
Sapto Aji Prabowo, head of the Aceh provincial conservation agency, villagers
spotted the badly wounded orangutan seeking shelter in a farm, along with its
malnourished, month-old baby.
Rescuers
managed to take the two animals to an orangutan veterinary clinic in the nearby
Sibolangit district, in north Sumatra, The Sun reports.
Sadly, Hope
cannot be released back into the wild due to her injuries.
Vet
Saraswati, who works with the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, said
that a number of pellets, unfortunately, had to be left in Hope, as the team
had to prioritise fixing her collar bone.
According to
the conservation program, pellet and air guns are easily available, and often
used to shoot and kill wildlife in Indonesia.
In the last
10 years, they have treated more than 15 orangutans with similar injuries to
Hope, totaling around 500 air gun pellets in their bodies. Countless more will
sadly have not been rescued.
In 2018, an
orangutan died in Borneo after being shot around 130 times by an air gun, which
was the second known killing of an orangutan that year.
A study last
year revealed the numbers of orangutans in the wild has drastically reduced
since 1999, with more than 100,000 being wiped out due to loss of land and
wildlife.
As the
industries behind palm oil and paper continue to expand, thereby encroaching on
the animals’ habitats, conflicts have been steadily increasing between the
people behind the corporations and conservationists working to protect the
land.
In Sumatra,
there are thought to be around 13,400 orangutans left in the wild. The species
is listed as ‘critically endangered’ on the IUCN Red List of endangered
animals.
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