Music 00:00
BOS workers with orang-utans
CAMPBELL: Dawn in this Borneo rainforest marks the start of jungle day-care.
Music 00:24
CAMPBELL: A team of babysitters carry young orang-utans out to their playground, a 62-hectare protected reserve. 00:43
Music 00:50
Lone: They love water.
CAMPBELL: They’ll spend the day learning the basic skills to one day survive in the wild.
Music 01:13
Lone with orang-utans
Lone: If they come in at the age of about one, it will take about seven years.
CAMPBELL: So it’s almost like preparing children for the outside world?
LONE: Well yes, it just goes a little bit faster. I mean, they graduate a little bit faster than what children do, and they’re not quite as expensive too.
CAMPBELL: Lone Droescher-Nielsen is a former flight attendant from Denmark who came here 13 years ago to see the jungle and fell in love with its animals. She now runs a rescue and rehabilitation centre for orang-utans that have fallen prey to the dangers of man.
BOS workers with orang-utans
Lone: It’s a totally different way of living than they would be if they were with the mothers. But we try the best that we can to give them lots of love and attention. There’s lots of bickering going on, a lot of jealousy between them, but they still seem to cope quite well, because they get love from the others as well. They have their social structure that they get within the group.
CAMPBELL: They have to nurture them by hand; feeding them by healthy food, making sure they have fresh milk and dealing with the trying demands of temperamental infants.
Lone: She’s just getting upset because her milk is not ready yet, just like children in the supermarket when they can’t have the chocolate.
CAMPBELL: Having a tantie!
Lone: Tantrum… Now you’ve got it, you don’t have to cry any more.
CAMPBELL: All too often they have to deal with problems that no infant should go through.
Super: Lone Droescher-Nielsen Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation Lone: This is Kessey. She had her hand cut off while they were killing her mother. They simply cut her mother to death with machetes.
Kessey in tree She’s doing perfectly fine actually. She’s taking a little bit longer than some of the others to climb bigger trees. But she is starting to climb up trees. She just uses her stump to hold on. Because she’s got three other limbs it’s a bit easier, we would be a bit more handicapped.
Bulldozers in jungle
Music
CAMPBELL: Every day, the province of Central Kalimantan reverberates to the sound of bulldozed jungle.
Palm plantation The vast forests of Borneo are the centre of a frenzied clearing program for palm plantations.
It’s cheap to plant, quick to grow and the wine-red fruit yields what many tout as green, renewable oil -- useful for everything from cooking oil to truck fuel.
Supermarket sequence
Music
CAMPBELL: Much of it ends up in supermarkets as a cheap food additive in hundreds of products from bread and biscuits to crisps and oatcakes.
It’s sometimes labelled palm oil, often just vegetable oil, with no warnings as to whether it’s been grown sustainably on abandoned farmland or from bulldozed forest.
Borneo river village
Few outside Borneo realise just how much damage has been done to the wildlife.
Sinasingham
Sinasingham is a 73-year-old Dayak leader who grew up in the forests. He now fears the orang-utans will disappear entirely.
Sinasingham: In past times there were many orang-utans living freely in the wild. They built their nests in the tops of trees.
Orang-utans in tree
After the forest was cleared, they cannot live any more. So please do not plant new palm oil plantations.
Music 05:33
CAMPBELL: Borneo’s forests have long been logged for timber, but the advent of palm oil has changed everything.
Orang-utans, gibbons, macaques and bears could survive in the secondary forests left after the best wood was removed. But the practice of clearing everything has left animals without any of their customary habitat.
Lone: Palm oil is totally destructive. They’re cutting down primary forest,
Lone totally bulldozing ever single tree down and they’re taking the top layer of the soil off too. There is nothing left. The seeds that might be there are gone.
Orang-utan in cleared forest being captures
CAMPBELL: Environmental groups claim some five million hectares of the orang-utans’ habitat have been destroyed for palm oil. When the forest disappears, instinct leads the apes back to what used to be their homes.
Orang-utan falls from tree
They cling to any stump in the cleared plantations, unable to understand where their food has gone. It’s left to privately-funded NGOs to rescue them before plantation workers kill them or sell the babies as pets.
Orang-utan is unloaded from crate
Lone Droescher-Nielsen’s group is BOS -- the Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation. Surviving precariously on donations, it sends teams to drug and capture lost orang-utans and eventually release them back into the wild.
Lone: We now work with almost all plantations in Central Kalimantan. Some are more willing to call us - because it doesn’t cost them anything –
Lone and for them I guess they think it’s a better image that they’re at least trying to help the orang-utans.
Driving through plantation with Budisantoso
CAMPBELL: This plantation, a two-hour drive from the reserve, sees itself as a model operation.
The manager, Yohanes Budisantoso, says it only grows palms on land that was already cleared.
Yohanes: Initially in the area bordering on the jungle there were one or two orang-utans, but because the BOS Foundation is here and we have a good relationship with them,
Plantation
if there are signs of them or an attack we call and report it.
CAMPBELL: But even here their workers have been known to panic and kill the apes.Lone: From that particular plantation
Lone
we have had three orang-utans they’ve tried to catch themselves that have died, simply because they’re using, you know, either machetes – and they almost cut the hands off a female orang-utan, and she bled to death before we got there.
Photos of injured and dead orang-utans
Music
CAMPBELL: BOS has compiled a horrific and ever-growing catalogue of the casualties of palm oil plantations.
Lone: We estimate about 5,000 orang-utans are killed at least every year. In another five or six years, if we don’t do something now, if we don’t watch out the orang-utan will be gone in the wild. This is not a natural disaster.
Lone This is a human caused disaster and it’s like an emergency we have here now. It’s really bad. As I say, thousands of orang-utans are being killed. It’s the saddest thing that you can imagine.
Nerang’s office CAMPBELL: The man who signs the palm oil concessions is the provincial governor, Augustin Teras Nerang. He denies licences are granted for virgin forest, insisting only land that’s already been cleared is available for plantations.
Nerang Nerang: The problem is not logging carried out by those who have permits, but by those who don’t have permits, and that’s what’s called illegal logging.
In my opinion, the problem is… if the international community doesn’t accept this then they won’t support the illegal loggers. But most unfortunately, the international still opens their doors to receive illegal timber.
Man sawing timber
CAMPBELL: But BOS insists most concessions are given for primary forests, simply because companies pay more to get the timber as well.Lone: The district chiefs can give out 10:52
Lone concessions, up to about 5,000 hectares on their own. And if the palm oil plantations give enough money under the table the district chiefs doesn’t really matter very much whether that land has got forest on it or not.
BOS screens video for students CAMPBELL: The lure of money has destroyed much of the traditional regard local people held for the jungle. BOS tries to counter it by teaching students of the dangers of uncontrolled development.
Siti with orang-utans Siti Nurhayati is one of 146 local staff working at the BOS centre.
Siti: Since BOS has been here lots of people, especially here in Palangka Raya, know a lot about how we need to protect the orang-utans and the jungle, and habitat for the future.
Cruelty video
CAMPBELL: But this amateur video of an orang-utan named Pony, shows how appalling, even sickening, the treatment can still be.
Lone: Here in Central Kalimantan lots of small villages have only prostitution and karaoke joints – and she was kept there in a room, tied round her ankle up against a wall, lying stomach down on a mattress, available for customers in the evening.
Lone
We tried for over a year to take her, and every single time we approached the people we were threatened both with guns and also machetes with poison on them.
BOS rescue orang-utan We continued to bring in more and more police officers, and in the end when we finally got to her we had thirty-six military police officers, machine guns with us in order to get her.
Pony in forest
CAMPBELL: Today, Pony remains shy and wary. But she’s been successfully released into a forest near the reserve, where nobody can hurt her again.
Orang-utans in cages
The scale of the problem has begun to overwhelm groups like BOS.
Lone with male orang-utan
This centre was built to keep a maximum of 100 apes. There are now 440. The centre now has to keep adult orang-utans far longer than expected, so much so that many have begun to mistake their carer for their mate.
So he thinks you’re his girlfriend?
Lone: Yes, he’s got goose-bumps on his face which means he’s very excited.
CAMPBELL: He’s jealous of us being here?
Lone: Yes, he doesn’t like men. He’s very jealous of men.
Orang-utan plays with Lone’s clothes
He’s totally focused on belly buttons and clothes.
You don’t need to open my bra too. That’s not nice. We’ve got guys around here.
CAMPBELL: The indignity of being manhandled by orang-utans has become just another part of her daily routine.
Working on minimal Indonesian wages, Lone Droescher-Nielsen has devoted her life to trying to save her ever growing brood.
Orang-utans
Lone: I mean you look at these guys. Lots of people say rehabilitation isn’t worth it. But what do people expect? That we just kill these little orphans. Just euthanase them. You look into their eyes and you just have to give them another chance. Because all their pain is caused by us.
Music
Lone and Campbell on boat going to release island
CAMPBELL: Lone’s most ambitious and controversial project is to rehabilitate the orphans back into the wild.
Lone: We’re going out one of our release islands where the orang-utans are living more or less freely, but still with help with food and stuff because the island is not big enough to support as many orang-utans as are here.
CAMPBELL: Many scientists are sceptical that orphans raised in captivity can be successfully released. She’s determined to prove them wrong. The technicians call out to let them know there’s food.
Lone: We have noticed it’s the females who are the most clever ones. CAMPBELL: Really? Lone: Oddly enough, yes.
Apes come for food
CAMPBELL: Within minutes, a trickle of near wild apes appears.
The island colony now has 43 apes adapting to independent living, six of them were born here.
Lone: This is Loder, with her baby.
Loran and Campbell on boat
I come out here at least every week and I’m still amazed. Especially as we’ve had these since they were tiny babies. And now seeing them being able to take care of themselves.
CAMPBELL: And their instincts come back?
Lone: Very much so, yes. You see the wild behaviour, breaking branches. In captivity you find lots of babies are not taken care of very well by the mothers, they throw them out or they just don’t seem to know what to do with them.
Music
Apes play with carers
CAMPBELL: It will be years before most of these young ones can be released. Hundreds more orphans may be brought here before they are.
Lone: They love to be tickled.
CAMPBELL: Centres like this give hope that Asia’s last great apes will endure in the wild. But that will ultimately rest on the world rejecting ape blood for palm oil.
Credits:
Music
BOS workers with orang-utans
CAMPBELL: Dawn in this Borneo rainforest marks the start of jungle day-care.
Music 00:24
CAMPBELL: A team of babysitters carry young orang-utans out to their playground, a 62-hectare protected reserve. 00:43
Music 00:50
Lone: They love water.
CAMPBELL: They’ll spend the day learning the basic skills to one day survive in the wild.
Music 01:13
Lone with orang-utans
Lone: If they come in at the age of about one, it will take about seven years.
CAMPBELL: So it’s almost like preparing children for the outside world?
LONE: Well yes, it just goes a little bit faster. I mean, they graduate a little bit faster than what children do, and they’re not quite as expensive too.
CAMPBELL: Lone Droescher-Nielsen is a former flight attendant from Denmark who came here 13 years ago to see the jungle and fell in love with its animals. She now runs a rescue and rehabilitation centre for orang-utans that have fallen prey to the dangers of man.
BOS workers with orang-utans
Lone: It’s a totally different way of living than they would be if they were with the mothers. But we try the best that we can to give them lots of love and attention. There’s lots of bickering going on, a lot of jealousy between them, but they still seem to cope quite well, because they get love from the others as well. They have their social structure that they get within the group.
CAMPBELL: They have to nurture them by hand; feeding them by healthy food, making sure they have fresh milk and dealing with the trying demands of temperamental infants.
Lone: She’s just getting upset because her milk is not ready yet, just like children in the supermarket when they can’t have the chocolate.
CAMPBELL: Having a tantie!
Lone: Tantrum… Now you’ve got it, you don’t have to cry any more.
CAMPBELL: All too often they have to deal with problems that no infant should go through.
Super: Lone Droescher-Nielsen Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation Lone: This is Kessey. She had her hand cut off while they were killing her mother. They simply cut her mother to death with machetes.
Kessey in tree She’s doing perfectly fine actually. She’s taking a little bit longer than some of the others to climb bigger trees. But she is starting to climb up trees. She just uses her stump to hold on. Because she’s got three other limbs it’s a bit easier, we would be a bit more handicapped.
Bulldozers in jungle
Music
CAMPBELL: Every day, the province of Central Kalimantan reverberates to the sound of bulldozed jungle.
Palm plantation The vast forests of Borneo are the centre of a frenzied clearing program for palm plantations.
It’s cheap to plant, quick to grow and the wine-red fruit yields what many tout as green, renewable oil -- useful for everything from cooking oil to truck fuel.
Supermarket sequence
Music
CAMPBELL: Much of it ends up in supermarkets as a cheap food additive in hundreds of products from bread and biscuits to crisps and oatcakes.
It’s sometimes labelled palm oil, often just vegetable oil, with no warnings as to whether it’s been grown sustainably on abandoned farmland or from bulldozed forest.
Borneo river village
Few outside Borneo realise just how much damage has been done to the wildlife.
Sinasingham
Sinasingham is a 73-year-old Dayak leader who grew up in the forests. He now fears the orang-utans will disappear entirely.
Sinasingham: In past times there were many orang-utans living freely in the wild. They built their nests in the tops of trees.
Orang-utans in tree
After the forest was cleared, they cannot live any more. So please do not plant new palm oil plantations.
Music 05:33
CAMPBELL: Borneo’s forests have long been logged for timber, but the advent of palm oil has changed everything.
Orang-utans, gibbons, macaques and bears could survive in the secondary forests left after the best wood was removed. But the practice of clearing everything has left animals without any of their customary habitat.
Lone: Palm oil is totally destructive. They’re cutting down primary forest,
Lone totally bulldozing ever single tree down and they’re taking the top layer of the soil off too. There is nothing left. The seeds that might be there are gone.
Orang-utan in cleared forest being captures
CAMPBELL: Environmental groups claim some five million hectares of the orang-utans’ habitat have been destroyed for palm oil. When the forest disappears, instinct leads the apes back to what used to be their homes.
Orang-utan falls from tree
They cling to any stump in the cleared plantations, unable to understand where their food has gone. It’s left to privately-funded NGOs to rescue them before plantation workers kill them or sell the babies as pets.
Orang-utan is unloaded from crate
Lone Droescher-Nielsen’s group is BOS -- the Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation. Surviving precariously on donations, it sends teams to drug and capture lost orang-utans and eventually release them back into the wild.
Lone: We now work with almost all plantations in Central Kalimantan. Some are more willing to call us - because it doesn’t cost them anything –
Lone and for them I guess they think it’s a better image that they’re at least trying to help the orang-utans.
Driving through plantation with Budisantoso
CAMPBELL: This plantation, a two-hour drive from the reserve, sees itself as a model operation.
The manager, Yohanes Budisantoso, says it only grows palms on land that was already cleared.
Yohanes: Initially in the area bordering on the jungle there were one or two orang-utans, but because the BOS Foundation is here and we have a good relationship with them,
Plantation
if there are signs of them or an attack we call and report it.
CAMPBELL: But even here their workers have been known to panic and kill the apes.Lone: From that particular plantation
Lone
we have had three orang-utans they’ve tried to catch themselves that have died, simply because they’re using, you know, either machetes – and they almost cut the hands off a female orang-utan, and she bled to death before we got there.
Photos of injured and dead orang-utans
Music
CAMPBELL: BOS has compiled a horrific and ever-growing catalogue of the casualties of palm oil plantations.
Lone: We estimate about 5,000 orang-utans are killed at least every year. In another five or six years, if we don’t do something now, if we don’t watch out the orang-utan will be gone in the wild. This is not a natural disaster.
Lone This is a human caused disaster and it’s like an emergency we have here now. It’s really bad. As I say, thousands of orang-utans are being killed. It’s the saddest thing that you can imagine.
Nerang’s office CAMPBELL: The man who signs the palm oil concessions is the provincial governor, Augustin Teras Nerang. He denies licences are granted for virgin forest, insisting only land that’s already been cleared is available for plantations.
Nerang Nerang: The problem is not logging carried out by those who have permits, but by those who don’t have permits, and that’s what’s called illegal logging.
In my opinion, the problem is… if the international community doesn’t accept this then they won’t support the illegal loggers. But most unfortunately, the international still opens their doors to receive illegal timber.
Man sawing timber
CAMPBELL: But BOS insists most concessions are given for primary forests, simply because companies pay more to get the timber as well.Lone: The district chiefs can give out 10:52
Lone concessions, up to about 5,000 hectares on their own. And if the palm oil plantations give enough money under the table the district chiefs doesn’t really matter very much whether that land has got forest on it or not.
BOS screens video for students CAMPBELL: The lure of money has destroyed much of the traditional regard local people held for the jungle. BOS tries to counter it by teaching students of the dangers of uncontrolled development.
Siti with orang-utans Siti Nurhayati is one of 146 local staff working at the BOS centre.
Siti: Since BOS has been here lots of people, especially here in Palangka Raya, know a lot about how we need to protect the orang-utans and the jungle, and habitat for the future.
Cruelty video
CAMPBELL: But this amateur video of an orang-utan named Pony, shows how appalling, even sickening, the treatment can still be.
Lone: Here in Central Kalimantan lots of small villages have only prostitution and karaoke joints – and she was kept there in a room, tied round her ankle up against a wall, lying stomach down on a mattress, available for customers in the evening.
Lone
We tried for over a year to take her, and every single time we approached the people we were threatened both with guns and also machetes with poison on them.
BOS rescue orang-utan We continued to bring in more and more police officers, and in the end when we finally got to her we had thirty-six military police officers, machine guns with us in order to get her.
Pony in forest
CAMPBELL: Today, Pony remains shy and wary. But she’s been successfully released into a forest near the reserve, where nobody can hurt her again.
Orang-utans in cages
The scale of the problem has begun to overwhelm groups like BOS.
Lone with male orang-utan
This centre was built to keep a maximum of 100 apes. There are now 440. The centre now has to keep adult orang-utans far longer than expected, so much so that many have begun to mistake their carer for their mate.
So he thinks you’re his girlfriend?
Lone: Yes, he’s got goose-bumps on his face which means he’s very excited.
CAMPBELL: He’s jealous of us being here?
Lone: Yes, he doesn’t like men. He’s very jealous of men.
Orang-utan plays with Lone’s clothes
He’s totally focused on belly buttons and clothes.
You don’t need to open my bra too. That’s not nice. We’ve got guys around here.
CAMPBELL: The indignity of being manhandled by orang-utans has become just another part of her daily routine.
Working on minimal Indonesian wages, Lone Droescher-Nielsen has devoted her life to trying to save her ever growing brood.
Orang-utans
Lone: I mean you look at these guys. Lots of people say rehabilitation isn’t worth it. But what do people expect? That we just kill these little orphans. Just euthanase them. You look into their eyes and you just have to give them another chance. Because all their pain is caused by us.
Music
Lone and Campbell on boat going to release island
CAMPBELL: Lone’s most ambitious and controversial project is to rehabilitate the orphans back into the wild.
Lone: We’re going out one of our release islands where the orang-utans are living more or less freely, but still with help with food and stuff because the island is not big enough to support as many orang-utans as are here.
CAMPBELL: Many scientists are sceptical that orphans raised in captivity can be successfully released. She’s determined to prove them wrong. The technicians call out to let them know there’s food.
Lone: We have noticed it’s the females who are the most clever ones. CAMPBELL: Really? Lone: Oddly enough, yes.
Apes come for food
CAMPBELL: Within minutes, a trickle of near wild apes appears.
The island colony now has 43 apes adapting to independent living, six of them were born here.
Lone: This is Loder, with her baby.
Loran and Campbell on boat
I come out here at least every week and I’m still amazed. Especially as we’ve had these since they were tiny babies. And now seeing them being able to take care of themselves.
CAMPBELL: And their instincts come back?
Lone: Very much so, yes. You see the wild behaviour, breaking branches. In captivity you find lots of babies are not taken care of very well by the mothers, they throw them out or they just don’t seem to know what to do with them.
Music
Apes play with carers
CAMPBELL: It will be years before most of these young ones can be released. Hundreds more orphans may be brought here before they are.
Lone: They love to be tickled.
CAMPBELL: Centres like this give hope that Asia’s last great apes will endure in the wild. But that will ultimately rest on the world rejecting ape blood for palm oil.
Credits:
Music