PEGAS received quite a surprise a few days ago from seeing a press report that Nobita and Shizuka had just been repatriated to Indonesia. The two infant orangutans were seized in a joint Royal Thai Police-Freeland Foundation sting on 24 December, 2016, almost exactly seven years ago. PEGAS set up the sting.
Supposedly they were being held all this time at the Khao Prathap Chang Wildlife Breeding Centre and Open Zoo in Ratchaburi Province, a little over 100 km from Bangkok.
I say ‘supposedly’, because I visited this facility on 1st February 2020 looking for Nobita and Suzuka. The staff there told me that they had been returned to Indonesia and currently there were no orangutans in residence. I toured the entire facility, which was nothing more than an open-air zoo, including in out-of-the-way back areas, and saw no signs of orangutans. There is photographic evidence that they were there at least until September 2017, a pictorial in the Daily Mail focused on them.
The Facebook account of the orang keeper at Khao Prathap also shows the last definite photo of the “kids” in September 2017.
If they weren’t at Khao Prathap, where were they? Could they have been farmed out to a commercial facility? Just before visiting Khao Prathap I visited Samutprakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo, which seems to have a steady supply of young orangutans and chimpanzees for visitors to play with and photograph. According to a tweet by Edwin Wiek, the taxi driver that delivered the kids to the sting claimed that they were owned by a ‘Joe’ at Samutprakarn. Were they returned to him for a stint of cuddling and photo-opping? Now, at seven, getting a bit too old for that, Joe returns them to Khao Prathap for repatriation?
I did see a young, caged orangutan at Samutprakarn in 2020. If it was one of the kids, it looked most like the female Shizuka, the gender of choice for commercial exotic animal facilities because of their docility.
PEGAS is extremely pleased that the kids have been returned home to Sumatra, but at 7 years old I don’t know about their chances of being rehabilitated for release into the forest. With great apes worth thousands of dollars each to traffickers, stopping their trading is turning out to be an extremely difficult challenge.
Project to End Great Ape Slavery (PEGAS) 