UNCONDITIONAL LOVE: Why people adore orangutans
Posted on 01. Sep, 2025 by Paul Sochaczewski in Environment, Environment EarthLove
Unconditional Love
Why People Adore Orangutans
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski
SARAWAK, Malaysia
One underlying theme of my satiric eco-novels Redheads and EarthLove is the affinity people have with orangutans.
I’ve never met anyone who has worked with orangutans who hadn’t developed a close emotional bond with the red apes, an example of what biologist Edward O. Wilson calls biophilia — “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”
* * *
What’s behind this connection between people and orangutans?
Perhaps it’s DNA. Based on DNA analyses, orangutans are among our closest relatives; we share some 97% of our DNA with the red apes (compared to 99% of DNA shared with chimpanzees).
Or it might be physical similarities. A widely publicized (and hotly debated) 2009 study published in the Journal of Biogeography suggested the DNA evidence cited by many scientists only looks at a small percentage of the human and chimp genomes. What’s more, the genetic similarities between chimps and humans likely include many ancient DNA traits that are shared across a much broader group of animals. Authors John Grehan, of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York State, and Jeffrey Schwartz, of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, say that physical similarities might be more important than DNA matches (which they describe as “problematic”) in determining which of the great apes are our closest relatives.
Grehan and Schwartz argue that humans share at least 28 unique physical characteristics with orangutans but only seven with gorillas and just two with chimps. These include
- Thickly enameled flat molar teeth
- Similar asymmetries between the left and right sides of the brain
- Similarly shaped shoulder blades
- A hole in the roof of the mouth
- Similar cartilage-to-bone ratios in the forearm
- Widely-separated mammary glands
- Hairlines
- Long lifespans and slow growth rates
The authors also suggest “that humans and orangutans share a common ancestor that excludes [living] African apes.”
But perhaps our affinity with orangutans is because they exhibit recognizable human-like behaviors?
People and orangutans have a long juvenile period and a slow rate of growth.
Like us, orangutans are tactile, clever, and curious.
Everyone who works with orangutans knows they are patient and able to solve mechanical problems — they are good at picking locks and escaping from cages, for example. They easily learn to mimic human behavior — in captivity they might brush their teeth or eat with a spoon.
But it is misleading to think that an orangutan’s intelligence equates with a human being’s. Orangutans are animals that use their intelligence to find food — they have good memories for recalling which trees might be fruiting and where they are located.
Even though the name orangutan means “person of the forest” in the Malay and Indonesian languages, we must remember they are not people. (For a discussion of a likely mythical Southeast Asian “snowman of the jungle” that purportedly also has some human-like characteristics, see Soul of the Tiger and An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles.)
Yet, like many people, orangutans in the wild enjoy power naps. In a 2025 study, Alison Ashbury, of The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, notes: “When an orangutan doesn’t get enough sleep it does what any sleep-deprived human might do. It climbs into bed and takes a nap.” Her co-author, Meg Crofoot, added it was possible a nap has “restorative effects on orangutans, helping them reset physiologically and cognitively after a poor night’s sleep.”
While several attempts have been made to teach American Sign Language to captive orangutans (as has also been attempted with chimpanzees and gorillas), it is unclear just how much real communication has been achieved by these long-term experiments. And since orangutans lack the vocal cords necessary for human-like speech, it’s unlikely we will ever achieve the elusive goal of having a sensible oral conversation with an orangutan.
Orangutans in captivity — the so-called rehabilitant animals found in well-intentioned rescue sanctuaries in Malaysia and Indonesia — jump the animal/human line all the time. They murder. They rape. They steal. They vandalize. They refuse to pay attention in class. They put dirty things in their mouths. They beg. They act like people.
Also, they’ve got that look. It’s an unforgettable expression. I recall a comment made by Malcolm MacDonald, former governor-general of colonial Malaya and Borneo: “These members of the order Primates contemplate you, when you meet them, with melancholy eyes, as if they had just read Darwin’s Origin of Species and were painfully aware of being your poor relations who have not done so well in life.”
* * *
I’ve been following the Southeast Asia trail of British naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace for more than 50 years. He too had memorable interactions with orangutans.
Wallace was a self-described “bug collector” who made his living in Southeast Asia by shooting, trapping, pickling, mounting and selling exotic wildlife to collectors in Europe.
He was, in some ways, a no-nonsense guy, struggling to make a living in a strange environment. He famously shot 17 orangutans during his 18-month sojourn in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo.
Without remorse, he preserved the apes he shot in casks of local moonshine.
But on one occasion, he went all soppy.
Wallace shot and killed an adult female orangutan, and when she fell, he heard a weak, plaintive cry. The adult had been nursing a baby, and Wallace adopted the helpless and frightened animal. He wrote five pages of sentimental, Hallmark card-like prose about how cute his baby orangutan was, how her antics delighted him, how she was bossed around by a more active hare-lip monkey of about the same age, how she would try to suckle on his finger. Not having any children of his own at the time, he declared, “Never was there a baby like my baby.” He planned to take it back to England. But the baby orangutan died, and Wallace dropped all mawkishness and reverted to his practical persona. He weighed and measured the dead infant — “three pounds nine ounces, its height fourteen inches.” He “preserved its skin and skeleton” and, through his agent, sold the specimen to a museum in England.
* * *
The future of these animals is grim.
The three species of orangutans are only found on the large Indonesian island of Sumatra and on the even larger island of Borneo (shared by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei). All species have experienced sharp population declines in recent years and are considered critically endangered by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
A 2018 multi-authored study published in the journal Current Biology reported: “Our models indicate that between 1999 and 2015, half of the orangutan population was affected by logging, deforestation, or industrialized plantations [primarily oil palm].”
Estimates of current population numbers vary. Nature conservation charity World Wildlife Fund suggests the population of the Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) is around 104,000 while the populations of the two Sumatran species are significantly fewer: About 14,000 Pongo abelii remain, and no more than 800 of the Tapanuli orangutan, Pongo tapanuliensis, considered the most endangered of all great apes, remain.
Like any five-and-a-half-year-old, Queenie loved to cuddle. She even had a sign for it, a molding of her thumb and forefinger into an “O,” which she revolved around her ear, which Gerry Schwartz always identified in his notes as “ballpoint.” It was a little joke between them, although probably lost on Queenie since the orangutan was unable to differentiate irony from a frying pan. She had signs for neither.“Now, what’s this?” Gerry asked, holding up a spoon.
Queenie lethargically made the “cuddle” sign and climbed onto Gerry’s lap.
“Good girl,” Gerry said, ticking the “right answer” box on his data sheet and slipping his ape student a reward for her last response, even though it was light years from being correct.
It was hell in the tropics, thought Gerry. Stuck in the middle of the jungle, trying to teach sign language to orangutans, with the nearest female days away. Of course there were women in the camp, but they were off limits. Gilda had her own liaison with Bujang, and even if she was available one can’t very well go screwing around with the head of the project. And the native female staff of the camp were out of bounds, although heaven knows he’d thought about it.
Okay, back to work. “Queenie, you little tease, if you get this one right I’ll give you a peanut. Now, apa ini?” Gerry asked, waving a frisbee in front of her. “What is this?”
Queenie climbed onto her teacher’s lap and began chewing on Gerry’s scraggly red beard. She slapped him twice on the head, affectionately.
“Was that a sign, or are you just pleased to see me?” Gerry joked. “Good girl. You got that one right,” Gerry decided as he rewarded Queenie with two peanuts and rewarded himself with another data entry in his notebook. If she continues at this rate, I’ll get a professorship by Christmas, he thought.
“Now, Queenie, let’s get serious. We’re working on a major breakthrough in communications here. You’ve got thirty-five signs, more than Koko had after studying even longer than you have. Let’s go for it. Show me the sign for book,” he said, waving a dog-eared copy of The Lord of the Rings in front of her face.
Gerry Schwartz was the latest in a not very large cohort of cross-species linguistic explorers. A student of B.F. Pong’s at the University of North Carolina, Gerry was the first person to try to teach American Sign Language, or Ameslan, to apes in a semi-wild situation. Previous researchers had worked with captive chimpanzees and gorillas but in secure environments that were suited more to the researcher’s comfort than to the students. Gerry’s Ph.D. project was to work with orangutans, which some people considered the most intelligent of the three great apes, in a situation in which they were free to come to class or not, free to play in the trees or sit in class and learn useless signs, free to respect their professor or wander off when it was lunch time in the camp and free bananas were available.
Queenie preferred an affectionate student-teacher relationship, differing only by degrees from those that Gerry had encouraged the undergraduate coeds back at the university to have with him. Juvenile orangutans are by nature both curious and tactile. Queenie, because she was orphaned at an early age, perhaps also suffered a heightened need for contact with another similarly intelligent primate.
At times Queenie ignored Gerry, contenting herself by wandering around the room, licking his moldy running shoes, chewing on his hairbrush. But now she was content to lie on her teacher’s lap, little hands and legs in the air like a puppy, while he tickled her stomach.
She got bored quickly, though, and ambled to a cushioned chair.
But a teacher retains control by disciplining the students. “Queenie. Datang sini.” She shuffled over and sat at his feet, looking up at him with large, round dark eyes that resembled those of the waifs immortalized on black velvet paintings. She hugged him around his right calf and paid no attention to Gerry’s admonition that she give him the sign for book. “Come on, Queenie. PLEASE. Just learn these fucking signs and make me famous. I’ll make it up to you.” Queenie took these warmly spoken entreaties as a sign of reconciliation, and she clambered back into Gerry’s lap, her orange hair mingling with his reddish chest hair.
Using the time-honored scientific principle of extrapolation, Gerry speculated that if Queenie had correctly used 10 signs yesterday it would not be unreasonable to note that today she had not only correctly repeated those signs but had also learned an additional two. Okay, if she masters two signs, or even one, every day, mustn’t be greedy, that Ph.D. will be in the bag. He showed her a new sign he had made up the night before. Gerry molded Queenie’s left-hand fingers into a waving “hello” flex while simultaneously adjusting her right index finger so it touched her left toes. It represented a rubber flip-flop sandal. After three rehearsals, Gerry declared that Queenie had mastered the new word-symbol. “Well done, girl. That brings you up to … let’s see …”
Before Gerry could finish his data point arithmetic he heard shuffling outside, followed by Gilda’s high-pitched voice.
“Gerry, we need to talk,” she said, starting the conversation while still 10-meters from Gerry’s front door.
“Not now Gilda,” he whined. “Queenie is about to make a breakthrough.”
I’ve written about orangutan behavior, threats (habitat destruction, oil palm plantations), the invincible power of Big Politics and Big Business, and well-intentioned but often impotent conservation efforts in five books:
“Redheads”, published by Explorer’s Eye Press, 2016.
ISBN: 978-2940573202.
“EarthLove” Chronicles of the Rainforest War, published by Explorer’s Eye Press, 2020.
ISBN: 978-2-940573-35-6
“An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles”, published by Explorer’s Eye Press, 2017.
ISBN: 978-2-940573-25-7
“A Conservation Notebook”, published by Explorer’s Eye Press, 2022.
ISBN: Trade Paperback: 978-2-940573-39-4
ISBN: eBook: 978-2-940573-40-0
“Curious Encounters of the Human Kind — Borneo”, published by Explorer’s Eye Press, 2016.
ISBN-10: 2940573093
ISBN-13 : 978-2940573097
