Senior Ragunan Zoo curator speaks out for orangs   

JAKARTA, Indonesia–Ragunan Zoo senior curator Ulrike Freifrau von Mengden on December 30, 2008 for the second time in three years put her unpaid job and her home inside the zoo at risk by speaking out on behalf of the orangutans she has looked after ever since the zoo opened.

Prompting von Mengden’s concern each time were the implications for nearly 50 orangutans of a long-evolving deal whereby the Ragunan Zoo is reportedly to acquire a female gorilla from the Howletts Wild Animal Park in Britain in early 2009, in trade for 12 primates of Indonesian species.

Brokered by Gibbon Foundation director Willie Smits, a Dutch-born Indonesian resident, the exchange was disclosed in February 2006.

Five silvery gibbons and several Javan langurs were sent to Howletts. Smits credited Howletts with curing the gibbons of diseases and getting them out of small cages.

Preparations to receive the female gorilla are still underway, Ragunan Zoo spokesperson Bambang Wahyudi recently told Mariani Dewi of the Jakarta Post.

The female gorilla is expected to arrive after a Ragunan Zoo veterinarian, a senior keeper, and a data base administrator complete three months of training at Howletts. Their training started in October 2008.

The series of animal swaps that are to culminate in the Ragunan Zoo acquring the female gorilla began coincidental with the opening of the Puck Schmutzer Primate Center in 2002, when Howletts sent four young male gorillas to the Ragunan Zoo. Only three of the gorillas have been mentioned in recent Ragunan Zoo announcements and media coverage. The International Primate Protection League has
received a report that the missing gorilla died from head injuries, but has not been able to confirm it, IPPL founder Shirley McGreal told ANIMAL PEOPLE.

Schmutzer, the Swiss patron of the Liechtenstein-based Gibbon Foundation, and longtime sponsor of von Mengden’s position at the Ragunan Zoo, funded the primate center in 2000.

A longtime friend of Howletts founder John Aspinall, who died in 2000, Schmutzer died in 2006. The Gibbon Foundation appears to have subsequently collapsed.

Von Mengden has contended since soon after Schmutzer’s death that Schmutzer would not have approved of the subsequent actions of Ragunan Zoo director Sri Mulyono. Hired in 2004, Sri Mulyono is the eighth Ragunan Zoo director von Mengden has worked under. A German-trained medical technical assistant, von Mengden emigrated to Indonesia in 1952, and soon became a volunteer at the former Cikini Zoo in Jakarta.

“Forty years ago the then-Jakarta Governor Ali Sadikin, Cikini Zoo director Benjamin Galstaun, his biologist wife, and I moved the zoo from Central Jakarta to Ragunan,” von Mengden recalled in 2006. “Since then I have lived in a part of the zoo not open to the public, rearing young orangutans, babies of
killed mothers, and animals who have been confiscated from people keeping them illegally as pets. We prepare them to be released into their natural habitat,” a goal that Aspinall, Schmutzer, and Smits all favored.

The primate center had semi-autonomy under the previous directors, but Smits’ “critical remarks and public protest against the wide destruction of the rain forests in Indonesia and clashes with the departments in charge, created high tension,” von Mengden charged in 2006.

When the Gibbon Foundation was no longer able to fund the primate center, von Mengden said, “In May 2006 the city government handed over the management centre to the zoo director. This resulted in the dismissal of a number of qualified employees. The well-equipped workshop with good technicians was closed. Now I don’t have much left from my old age pension for food for the neglected animals, repair of old cages, for medicine, and for salaries of many workers.

“The original plan was to keep animals only from Southeast Asia to promote knowledge of them among the people, especially children, but was abandoned,” von Mengden alleged.

“The original aim of the center catering to the poor was diminished,” von Mengden added in her December 2008 statement, “since entry into the primate center requires a separate fee, prohibitively expensive for poor Indonesian children. The center currently houses a variety of primates,” she noted, “including chimpanzees, three African gorillas, gibbons, siamangs, lorises and a few fortunate orangutans.”

But the Primate Center does not house the whole Ragunan Zoo orangutan collection, von Mengden wrote to the Jakarta Post.

“Unbeknownst to most visitors,” von Mengden said, “there are close to 50 other orangutans living at the zoo. These orangutans could not be accommodated in the primate center, but were promised new enclosures. That promise has been unfulfilled. For more then 10 years,” von Mengden added, “I have been waiting for the release of several eligible orangutans back into the wild. Currently, they are waiting patiently in rotten dark cages, some of which were built for bears and cats, and were used for quarantine
areas. Many times full-grown orangutans have tried to escape. One managed to lift a piece of iron fence from the concrete walls, so desperate was that orangutan to see sunlight.

“My hopes quickly turned to bitter tears,” von Mengden said, “when I learned that [construction at the zoo] would become a new gorilla enclosure! How can Indonesia’s beloved national treasures sit and rot while the zoo builds a beautiful enclosure for an African animal? Who will care for Indonesia’s red-haired
children,” she asked, “if not the Indonesian people themselves?”

Commented McGreal, “IPPL fails to understand how exhibiting gorillas will help Indonesia’s unique red apes, who are in desperate straits. England often has dismal dreary weather, totally unsuitable for
rainforest primates. It seems that a lot of money has been spent on this questionable animal deal, including plenty on travel. This was money better spent on protecting Indonesia’s forests and wonderful animals.”

–
Merritt Clifton
Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE
P.O. Box 960
Clinton, WA 98236

Telephone: 360-579-2505
Fax: 360-579-2575
E-mail: anmlpepl@whidbey.com
Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

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