The Interspecific Work of Care: Intimacy and Vulnerability in Orangutan Rehabilitation on Borneo

• In Event: 215. Interspecies Intimacy: Evolving Human-Animal Socialities in Asia

Abstract

Orangutan rehabilitation centers offer people the chance to be physically near critically endangered species that they otherwise would never encounter and that are only found in Borneo and Sumatra, present day Indonesia and Malaysia. Such encounters fuel an ‘eco-tourist’ economy in which local staff facilitate interactions between foreign paying volunteers and endemic animals that are facing extinction. Specifically in Malaysia, wildlife rehabilitation centers care for critically endangered and endemic orangutans by training them for ‘semi-wild’ livelihoods in national parks to be visited by tourists, even though orangutans are generally solitary, rarely seen in the wild by people, and are potentially dangerous since they are about ten times stronger than humans. Local keepers at these sites have the paradoxical job of training orangutans to fear people. While the orangutans are vulnerable to negative reinforcement and with it the use and threat of pain, the keepers are vulnerable to the very real possibility that the orangutans under their care inflict pain and violence upon them, especially in the form of bites.

This paper examines how the work of care at orangutan rehabilitation centers engages an unequal exchange of mutual vulnerability. These sites serve as examples for which to understand human-animal relations in the context of Southeast Asian naturecultures and threats to biodiversity (Tsing 2005, Parreñas 2012, Cribb, Gilbert, and Tiffin 2014, Parrenas 2016). It is based on seventeen months of research between 2008 and 2010.

Author

• Juno Salazar Parrenas, Ohio State University