Orangutans at the Singapore zoo. Photo by Shawn Thompson
Today, at the zoo in Singapore, I communed with orangutans.
I sat with the fifteen-year-old orangutan Miri and her second child, the two-year-old Ahseng. Miri munched leaves and touched me absent-mindedly with her large hands without looking at me. Her son gave a rather direct and belligerent stare.
Miri was born in the zoo and has the reputation of being a gentle orangutan who likes to vocalize. She chewed the mulberry leaves that she loves until it was wet with saliva, then rubbed it on her arm to get a kind of foam, which she sucked.
"She understands what we want," the keeper Mohamed Arshad told me. Orangutans are observant, he said. "They study us the same time as we study them."
Jackson Raj, the head orangutan keeper, told me that Miri is a "good learner" and is "very focused." She is also very protective of her baby. She lets Raj groom the baby, but not hold him like other orangutans would.
I also sat with a group of five orangutans who touched me and let me touch them. I combed the hair of a mother with her child and gave them small pieces of fruit. They were gentle with me. I put the fruit in their mouths without fear of being bitten. They smelled my skin and touched me with hands and large soft lips.
It was a peaceful experience. I felt a sense of calm came over me.
Ever since I started working on a book about orangutans ten years ago I was worried that if I got close to orangutans I would affect them. I didn't want my presence to change them.
But today at the zoo, the head curator, Alagappasamy (Sam) Chellaiyah, told me that he believes there is a distinct difference between orphan orangutans raised from infancy by human beings and orangutans raised among their own kind in a zoo, with occasional contact with human beings. The Singapore zoo has one orangutan, Charlie, who was raised by human beings and is dysfunctional.
It is a fierce debate in orangutan circles whether human beings should have direct contact to rehabilitate orphan orangutans and return them to the wild.
Chellaiyah says that young orangutans shouldn't be raised by human beings because they "imprint" on them and think of themselves as human beings, not orangutans. Their behaviour becomes dysfunctional and they are not good parents.
During the day I also talked to Nick Mulcahy, a British researcher in comparative psychology from the University of Queensland in Australia. It was a stark contrast between the strict empiricism of Mulcahy and the spirituality of Chellaiyah.
Mulcahy is doing what is called "object choice tests" at the zoo where orangutans are guided to a treat hidden in a container by Mulcahy pointing a finger. Orangutans failed this test before, until Nick moved the containers away from in front of them and to the side, on the periphery. Then the orangutans succeeded in following the pointing finger.
Mulcahy is so empirical that he believes there still need to be other tests to show that orangutans understand the intent of human beings to communicate with them, to show that they know we are trying to tell them something. He will do tests next to see if the orangutans follow the gaze of human eyes to hidden fruit. He thinks orangutans will be able to do that.
Mulcahy talked about the difference between orangutans and chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are direct, he said; orangutans may look relaxed and calm, but can be are mischievous, deceptive and "abstruse."
After Mulcahy, I talked to Chellaiyah again and he told me a spiritual story about orangutans, who he believes have souls, although he can't prove it empirically.
Chellaiyah not only believes that orangutans have souls - and agreed with me that killing them should be considered murder - but says that after an orangutan dies all the orangutans look in the same direction together as though they are seeing the spirit of the departed orangutan.
Chellaiyah makes sure that the orangutans who die at the zoo are given a proper burial on the grounds and he says a prayer over them. He cried when his beloved orangutan Ah Meng died and planted a durian tree on her gravesite. Orangutans love durian fruit. He puts flowers at the gravesite of Ah Meng and talks to her. Sam had been with Ah Meng for thirty-six years. She was forty-eight when she died.
Chellaiyah knew I was not a religious person like him, but he said he trusted me and told me the story "because you are listening and that is enough."
In the evening I went to wash my clothes at a laundromat in the red light district of Singapore, sitting on the doorstep to read a book by the light of the laundromat and trying to make sense of what I heard during the day.
There was a Malaysian at the laundromat who worked at a casino in Singapore and said he was writing a book about magic amulets. He said that his casino used magic amulets to give the gamblers bad luck. He asked me to send him an e-mail if I ever came across a tiger skin, which he wanted. I said I wouldn't do that because tigers are endangered and it would give me bad luck. He looked baffled at that.
I thought about my experience with the orangutan Miri.
I don't know if Miri has a soul, but she was calm and oblivious of me. It was strange to be the presence of a large intelligent creature like Miri who could seem to ignore me so well. In a way, it felt good to be ignored. Maybe we should be ignored.
I remembered what people as diverse as the Canadian anthropologist Birute Galdikas and the American ape keeper Terri Hunnicutt both told me. They said orangutans don't need us. Orangutans are not interested in us.
They are detached and don't have the social needs of chimpanzees and gorillas. That may also allow them to maintain some mental distance from us. They can inhabit their own mental world.
That may be good for them and it might be a lesson for us to take from them.
