“Moms Come Together to Show Orangutan How to Feed Her Baby at Dublin Zoo”
In what is seen as perhaps the greatest show of getting into another species’s shoes, let alone canopy dwellers, 30 lactating mothers recently converged at Dublin Zoo to help a 19-year-old female Bornean orangutan, Mujur, learn how to feed her newborn son. The extraordinary intervention follows Mujur’s earlier failed attempts at nurturing her infants after losing two of them in 2019 and 2022 because she could not raise them well.”.
Bornean orangutans are critically endangered, with just over 100,000 surviving. The slow reproductive rate of their species, where females give birth only once in seven to nine years, hugely turns the survival of each individual infant into a big question for the continuation of the species.
Lizzie Reeves organized an unconventional breastfeeding workshop where the women, in their dedication, removed their tops to give Mujur a clear view of the feeding process.
Nora Murphy, one of the volunteers who breastfed her 10-month-old daughter Elodi, was struck by Mujur’s intense focus: “She would watch so closely, really studying what we were doing. As time passed, she even started hand-expressing, which felt like magic.”
If orangutans are the champions of breastfeeding for primates, it is that they frequently do this for up to 8 years. In this way, mothers can fully wean their schools, another adaptation to their very challenging habitat—the rainforest.
Tanya Smith, a researcher at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, explains that through these means, it becomes possible to have an overview of both time and form of orangutans’ baby feeding. Growing patterns in teeth are comparably similar to tree rings, just that they offer more than mere life timelines—the information they give is of what it has taken in.
While this heartwarming story has touched many, it has also ignited discussions on wildlife conservation and the ethical question of keeping these primates in captivity. Some of these viewers argued that the separation led to the infant finally being removed for bottle feeding and traumatized the other infant that was with her.
Regardless of the outcome, this was a groundbreaking approach to animal care that pointed to the potential for human-animal connectiveness and for the shared experiences of motherhood to have meaning across species. As Mujur may still have more offspring in her future, the lessons learned from this singular experiment could prove invaluable for her and other orangutan mothers in captivity.”
Article Source: Bored Panda
