Palm Oil Harvesters foresters drive out orangutans
A female orangutan eats bananas at Tanjung Puting National Park on
Borneo island, Indonesia.
Of an estimated 60,000 orangutans left in the
wild, most are unlikely to survive in small, scattered populations.
Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of
his "angels," is the only one still at it. And the red apes she studies
in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being
clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations.
People are still rich enough to kill anything they want
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=389461&type=Feature"We do about 40 hunts a year and we've had one cancellation based
on the recession this year. The client said that (the recession) was
the cause of it," said Alistair Pole of Zambezi Hunters, which sells
elephant and rhino hunts in Zimbabwe costing tens of thousands of
dollars.
"I would say 80 percent of our clients are in the
wealthy bracket," he said. Permits to shoot species such as rhino and
elephant are limited and such hunts can cost up to US$100,000.