M.O.M. — About the Campaign
Puppe (r), Budi & older daughter Jahe at the Toronto Zoo. Photo © Bev Carter
Mother’s Day is the perfect day to celebrate and pay tribute to M.O.M.– Missing Orangutan Mothers. 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 Nyaru Menteng– which is operated by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation and managed by Lone Droscher Nielsen. The Center is now home to nearly 650 orangutans– the vast majority of them young orphans in need of love and care.
Mother’s Day is the perfect day to bring awareness 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.
I have been working closely with Miami Metrozoo docent and orangutan lover Holly Draluck to gather materials and make them available for download from the Orangutan Outreach 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 put them on the website.
Holly 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: hollyweb@bellsouth.net
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-an-orangutan/ 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– I want to stress that we are NOT viewing this as a fundraising campaign, per se. I fully understand that zoos operate on tight budgets and outside organizations are not permitted to solicit funds on zoo grounds. So let me 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 our orphans… But there are no obligations or expectations. This is just an attempt to raise awareness…
Please feel free to contact me or Holly 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….
I know Mother’s Day is less than a month away, but we can’t afford to wait til next year. Lives are at stake! The time to act is now!
Thanks so much!
Rich (and Holly: hollyweb@bellsouth.net )
A message from Holly Draluck
