M.O.M. -- Missing Orangutan Mothers

THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the MOM Campaign this year. It was a huge success! Between all the zoos that took part, we were able to talk to thousands of people about orangutans and explain how critical it is to protect them and their forest home....

Keep checking back for photos from the events! {:(|}

Scroll down to see links to photos from the events....

SAVE THE DATE to SAVE ORANGUTANS
Mother’s Day, May 9th, 2010
M.O.M. – Missing Orangutan Mothers Awareness Event

2010 Banner Photo: Orangutans Sara and her daughter, Reese, Rio Grande Zoo, Albuquerque, NM taken by Lisa Westfall

Mother’s Day is the perfect day to celebrate and pay tribute to orangutan mothers. M.O.M.– Missing Orangutan Mothers is our way of doing precisely this!

Orangutan mothers and babies have an incredibly close relationship. Baby orangutans don’t have a support network around to give them the many lessons of finding fruit, building nests and other survival techniques. Their mothers teach them everything about survival in the forest before they set out on their own.

Becuase of the growing demand for palm oil, more and more orangutan mothers are being killed every year in Indonesia. Their rainforest homes are literally being wiped out to make way for palm oil plantations… leaving hundreds of helpless orphans. Some of the lucky ones end up at BOS Nyaru Menteng, BOS Samboja Lestari or IAR Ketapang. Between them, these centers are now home to nearly 1000 orangutans– the vast majority of them orphaned and displaced orangutans in need of love and care.

Mother’s Day is the perfect day to bring attention to the plight of these beautiful red apes and to encourage people to want to help protect them.

We are hoping to have events at zoos across the country– even some international zoos have expressed interest! The M.O.M. event can be as elaborate as you want it to be– but it doesn’t have to be. It can be quite simple…. in all honesty, a table and chair will suffice.

Orangutan Outreach has been gathering materials and is making them available for download from our website. We will have fliers, info sheets, posters, games, quizzes, pictures and adoption leaflets all at your disposal. The pictures alone will tell the whole story! Everything is yours to take and use as you see fit! As materials become available, we will add them to the website.

Our dedicated volunteer Holly Draluck has generously made herself available to answer any questions about how to entertain and educate crowds of any age– kids, teens, retired folks… you name it. Please feel free to contact her directly: holly@redapes.org.

One caveat on our ‘official’ Orangutan Outreach adoption leaflet– we can send you a stack of copies, but we don’t have a lot of them (they’re expensive to print). They are used to promote our online adoption program– which you can find out more about here: http://redapes.org/adopt The program itself is all handled online– so all people really need to know in order to adopt an orangutan is our website address: redapes.org

On a final note– We want to stress that we are NOT viewing this as a fundraising campaign, per se. We fully understand that zoos operate on tight budgets and outside organizations are not permitted to solicit funds on zoo grounds. So let us state for the record that our intention is NOT to compete; rather, it is to assist in any way possible to facilitate getting the message out to zoo visitors that orangutans have been pushed to the brink of extinction in the wild and if we don’t act now, they will be extinct in less than a decade. If a collection jar is put out & money happens to be raised, and a participating institution wants to make a donation to Orangutan Outreach, we would of course be thrilled. (We are a tax exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.) We would love for visitors to feel inspired, go home, log onto our website and adopt an orangutan orphan… But there are no obligations or expectations. This is just an attempt to raise awareness…

Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

If you’d like to participate in this special Mother’s Day event, please let us know. We will do our best to contact local media outlets to help promote it….

Lives are at stake! The time to act is now!

Thanks so much!

Rich and Holly

Free Downloadable Materials

All of these full color documents and banners are yours to download and use at your zoo to help raise awareness of the crisis facing wild orangutans. We will be constantly updating this section, so keep checking back... For more information, please contact Holly Draluck. Download the materials here.