I hope the plight of the baby orangutans wakes up our conscience.
Five baby orangutans, thousands of kilometres from the rainforests they call home, were found in a forest in Balasore, Odisha. They should have been clinging to their mothers, learning to move through the forest canopy, and sleeping among the trees of Borneo or Sumatra. Instead, these tiny creatures were found alone in a forest thousands of kilometres away, in a land that is not their home. It is difficult not to wonder what they had already endured before they were found. The discovery is extraordinary. The circumstances behind it are troubling.
How did five young orangutans come to be there? Authorities suspect that the animals may have been brought into India through an international wildlife-trafficking network. Their origin and journey are being investigated. For now, they are being cared for and quarantined at Nandankanan Zoological Park in Bhubaneswar. But care cannot erase the dislocation. Whatever happened to them, five young animals have been separated from the forests in which they should have grown up—from the trees they would have known, the environment to which their bodies are adapted, and the lives that should have been theirs.
Their future will depend on careful assessment and international coordination, including any possibility of returning them to their native habitat. There is also an important distinction to be made. Keeping or caring for a wild animal is not, in itself, necessarily wrong or unlawful. Zoos, rescue centres and other authorised institutions may keep wildlife under regulated conditions for conservation, rehabilitation, treatment or education. In some circumstances, private individuals may also lawfully keep wildlife. The concern begins when a wild animal is treated primarily as a commodity—when rarity itself becomes a reason to acquire it, display it or turn it into a symbol of status. That concern becomes far more serious when the animal has been illegally captured, transported or traded.
Perhaps this is the uncomfortable question the five orangutans leave us with: when money can buy almost anything, do we begin to believe that everything we desire should be obtainable? There are many things wealth can buy—luxuries, experiences, objects that bring pleasure or signal status. But wealth does not give us an entitlement to everything that can be bought. A wild animal is not a luxury. It is not a status symbol. And it should never become another toy for the affluent, valued for its rarity or the prestige it confers rather than for what it is—a living creature with a life and a place of its own.
The rich can have other toys. A wild animal is not one of them.
