Image: A young orangutan escape artist in training / A. Dawson 
As a boy, whenever I would watch old Cowboy and Indian movies on Sunday afternoon TV I would always instinctively root for the Indians. Little did I know it at the time, but an anthropologist was being born.
Now I find myself in the same position. Two months ago a chimpanzee in Sweden stockpiled rocks in order to throw them at gawking tourists. As a result, he became famous as the Pan troglodytes equivalent of the Iraqi shoe thrower. Unfortunately for both, their aim wasn’t as good as their initial idea. Now, an orangutan in an Australian zoo has orchestrated an elaborate escape attempt that should be hailed as an act of civil disobedience unmatched in the annals of apedom.
According to the UK Globe and Mail, the 137 pound orangutan named Karta:
used a stick to twist together electric wires circling her enclosure, resulting in the power supply - which would have given her a jolt if she'd touched the live wires - being cut off. She clambered through the fencing and entered a bushy area near a glass and concrete fence that separated her from the public. But that barrier did not deter her. After examining the height of the fence, she began piling sticks, grass and plant roots and used them as a ladder to climb onto the top of the fence.
Way to go sister! Of course, once she got out and looked around at the screaming humans, she decided she didn’t really want to be so close to these naked apes and went back inside.
If only she knew sign language. Her interspecies co-conspirators could have posed as tourists and arranged for a van at the zoo entrance before whisking her back to Borneo. Just like her onetime co-star Clint Eastwood, Karta would have pulled off a prison break unmatched since Escape from Alcatraz.
Last updated:
Tuesday, 12 May
2009 - 19:35 UTC
You go, girl!
I love orangs.
That’s amazing- she piled objects up to climb up? I guess they’re keeping a good eye on her now, but it would be amazing to see what else she can build and work her way round when left to her own devices.
I like orangs (but prefer Pygmy marmosets , though I don’t think they’ve managed feats this worthy of the Annals of Apedom).
The newspapers always tend to lend a sort of intentionality to such actions, but wouldn’t you think they imply that she is simply quite bored and apt to take advantage of any interesting change in her situation?
I could see a cat doing the same sort of thing, except for having the ability to fiddle with the electric wires. Then again, I know some rabbits who would make short work of them. The stockpiled rock story caught my attention more.
But we do like to cheer for the underdog. I’m always very ambivalent about zoos – their conservation efforts are of course to be lauded, and their potential educational value can not be overstated, and yet there is an irrational part of me that empathizes with penned animals far from their natural habitat (where that particular individual probably would have died, anyhow).
@Heather: I agree. Zoos are complicated. Whenever I went to the zoo as I kid I wanted to stay all day in front of the monkey house. Little did I know that I would spend several years of my life doing that later on. But it has always been accompanied with a touch of sorrow. What was their crime that would cause them to be imprisoned for life? I feel the need to sit down and explain things to them. I imgaine it’s visiting hours and I’m talking to Karta on the wall phone with our fingertips pressed up together against the glass.
“We need you here because too many in our species don’t know what nature is any longer. You’re the only way we can be educated about it. See, we’re destroying our planet and you are helping us learn about what we’re losing.”
She doesn’t understand, and finds it very unfair. But her eyes make things obvious. “You’re trying to control nature. You have from the beginning. That’s why you’re in this mess. Seeing me here only reinforces that illusion of control.” She doesn’t really say that (she’s not Ishmael, afterall) but in my imagination she does. And she’s right.
So, yes, education, conservation, a museum of living nature; I can see the benefit for it all. But it’s a band-aid for a hemophiliac. I don’t have a better solution, but I know it’s not going to help in the long run. But what will? It’s complicated.
It is complicated, and I share Heather’s ambivalence. It’s almost as if we’re sacrificing individuals for the greater good (of the species, and of human understanding; I got into biology through a combination of David Attenborough, James Herriot, and annual visits to our nearest zoo).
I wish someone had told me I only needed to visit the jungles of Adelaide for an up-close personal encounter with an Orangutan – rather than the 4 days I spent camping in the Borneo rainforest!!
Actaully, that’s not true… an experience I doubt will ever be beaten ;)
Heather, having seen for myself how perilous their survival is in the wild, zoos are unfortunately the only places they will be around in the not too distant future.
Cath – for me it was James Herriot, too, the combination of Madeleine L’Engle and the nearby New England Aquarium (a zoo in its own right, of course).
I suppose our response to zoos is pretty general – witness the famous scene from HP and the snake house.
I visited the Hamburg zoo two weeks ago – the last time I had been there is 20 years ago {gasp}. It’s quite a nice zoo, as far as zoos go, but I was frightened by the number of animals that had ‘Endangered’ on the sign in front of their enclosure. It seemed like almost every second! That visit 20 years ago was when I watched an older Orangutan lady try to pull up a handle to open a gate using a bit of ripped sackcloth – the handle was out of her reach, and she had to get the cloth to slip around the handle (in a loop) and hold on to both ends to pull it up. I watched for a long time, fascinated by how focused she was.
Eric, I love your comment even more than your post. I have the creeping suspicion that zoos will not educate people that don’t care about nature and our planet in the first place as much as we’d hope (if at all) – there are just so many people who don’t ‘get it’ and see the zoo just as entertainment.
(p.s. they have two amazing grizzlies from Kamchatka in Hamburg – brother and sister. There was a feeding during which the keeper explained about their origin and threats to these grizzlies there – Kamchatka was mostly closed off by military during Soviet times, and now that it’s open the grizzlies are getting decimated.)
I once heard Lawrence Anthony interviewed on the radio. He was the first civilian allowed into Iraq after the 2003, and he went because of the suffering and abuse going on at Baghdad Zoo. He managed to save some of the surviving animals, and took in abandoned animals from various horrific private zoos around the city. I haven’t read his book (Babylon’s Ark) but on the radio he said he didn’t approve of zoos, but could see no other option for the captured animals in Iraq. I like this quote from him, it seems to have a sort of ‘zooiness’:
“I have never understood the saying ‘To think outside the box.’ Rather just get out of the box.”
(Lawrence Anthony is head of conservation at the Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand South Africa and involved in many related initiatives.)
You know, I’m astonished that with all of us primates here, nobody has mentioned how boring life must be for these “people”. Perhaps zoos ought to be required to provide primates with an interesting enough environment, with enough puzzles (ideally with rewards) to keep them un-bored.