New Study Illustrates Impact of Hunting on Kalimantan's Orang-utans

A new study, published in PLoS One this week by Erik Meijaard and colleagues, illustrates the large impact that direct killing of orang-utans by humans in Kalimantan is having on the orang-utan population (the paper can be downloaded for free here). The 32-person research team conducted interviews with 6,983 respondents in 687 villages across Kalimantan to query respondents about their wildlife and orang-utan encounters, orang-utan conflicts and killings, and relevant laws.

A total 15% of respondents that were deemed reliable (i.e. had correctly identified pictures of orang-utans and other similar-looking forest primates) reported that orang-utan conflicts had occurred in their village. More tellingly, killing of orang-utan(s) at some time was reported by at least one reliable respondent in 42% of villages around which orang-utans had been seen and in 21% of the total villages surveyed. Hunting was mostly for food, in alleged self defense and because orang-utans were perceived as pests.

The authors estimate that between 750-1,800 animals were killed by people in Kalimantan in the last year. Although it is difficult to confirm whether such figures are 100% accurate, this study nevertheless indicates that killing of orang-utans is widespread and common across Kalimantan and, hence, is likely to be having a serious negative impact on their population. This supports previous studies illustrating that orang-utan densities in East Kalimantan were more closely associated with distance to the nearest village known to hunt orang-utans than to any other variable (Marshall et al., 2006) and OuTrop team members' observations showing the widespread and intensive hunting of large fruit bats for food across Central Kalimantan (Harrison et al., 2011). Habitat loss and degradation remains the predominant threat for most animals in Kalimantan but, for certain species at least, it seems that we ignore human appetites for forest culinary delicacies at our peril.