Our Vanishing Relative The Status of Wild Orang-utans at the Close of the Twentieth Century

About this book

Rijksen was among the first to make a detailed study of the ape in the wild, emerging as an authority on orang-utan conservation. In the late 1980s he became so alarmed by local rumours of the rapid decline of wild orang-utans that he initiated the study leading to this book. Meijaard conducted the ambitious, island-spanning surveys in Borneo and Sumatra to reveal the ape's whereabouts. This is the story of their findings. It is the first comprehensive study of the ape's distribution and status based on a wealth of first-hand field data, and a frank, disturbing account of a mixture of good intentions, ignorance and greed, spelling doom for our Asian relative.

Contents

Acknowledgements. Summary. Section I: The orang-utan. Introduction. A history of the orang-utan's distribution. Ecology and natural history. A history of hunting and poaching. History of orang-utan conservation. Rehabilitation of orang-utans. Section II: Orang-utan distribution. Survey methods. The present distribution. Evaluation of survey data. Section III: The decline. Summary of survey results. Discussion. Section IV: The future of the wild orang-utan. Prospects of survival. The orang-utan survival programme. Section V: Appendices and references. Appendix I: Vernacular names. Appendix II: What's in a name? Appendix III: IUCN criteria. Appendix IV: Estimates of orang-utan numbers per fragment (Table XXVII). Appendix V: Research at Ketambe (Aceh, Sumatra) (Table XXVIII). References. Index.

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