Orangutan is a Malay word. It means person of the forest.
A couple of hundred Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus, the rarest orangutans, are recently found in the forests of Indonesia. Orangutans share 97% of our DNA. They are our cousins, but we don’t spare them, we kill them the way we kill other animals. The truth is, we have killed almost all Orangutans. Only a few thousands of Orangutans are left in the world. They will soon be extinct if no serious initiative is taken to get rid of the threats they are facing. Orangutans are dying out because of habitat destruction, deforestation, palm-oil plantations. The plantation guys kill Orangutans for crop protection, and pay $100 for a dead Orangutan. Hundreds of Orangutans get killed every year. Congolese people kill Gorillas to make exotic hand ashtrays. Do people in Indonesia and Malaysia kill Orangutans to make souvenir ashtrays out of their dried hands to sell to the horrid tourist trade!
The forests will be there. But no ‘person’ will be in the forests.