26 March 2007

They may be ginger but we should save them anyway!

Concern grows over the fate of the orang-utan as its habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia comes under great pressure largely due to forest clearance to feed the world's insatiable appetite for palm oil. There may only be a few years left to save them in the wild. We all need to do what we can.

Note: in a case of political correctness gone mad yesterday's story on this subject in the Observer, in a little primer at the end, notes that the name of the primate derives from the "Malay words 'orang hutan', which literally mean "person of the forest". I should like to point out to them that the words literally mean "MAN of the forest". Let's not alter Malay language without the permission of Malays themselves.

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