G u n u n g
L e u s e r
Saving the Great Apes
By John McMahon
D
uring a month-long trek through Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia, my guide explains that orangutan means ‘man of the forest’ in Malay, orang meaning man and hutan meaning forest. But few may know that this term didn’t originally refer to the great apes; it was once the name for the fierce tribes who lived on the islands around mainland Malaysia. Europeans muddled the names and it stuck. Today, even in modern Malay the four species of red ape, found only in Borneo and Sumatra, wear that moniker. Of the few remaining places in the world where orangutans can be seen in the wild, Butak Lawang just inside the 3,000-square-kilometer Gunung Leuser National Park is the best known, for good reason. In 1973 two Swedish women established the Bohorok Orangutan Center there as the first official orangutan rehabilitation project in the world.
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