Shackled: One woman's campaign to save an orang-utan called Mely, who is chained up so paying tourists can see her misery

By BILL MOULAND and LAURA POWELL

Misery: Mely is kept by the fisherman on a stinking verandah just yards from the jungle where she should be free to roam.


Her look seems to plead with you. Mely the orang-utan is a pitiful sight as she sits slumped, depressed and shackled by a chain.

The 15-year-old ape was snatched as a baby from her rainforest home by a fisherman who had callously shot dead her mother. He seized Mely and keeps her captive, constrained by padlocks and chains on the balcony of his riverside shack near the River Sambas in Borneo. Why? The fisherman charges gullible tourists a fee to look at her.

Mely is now so weak that her long arms, which should be propelling her happily through the rainforest canopy, are barely strong enough to pull her to her feet. She is constantly shackled and is fed an utterly unsuitable diet of raw noodles, chilli powder and other donated food scraps from passers-by. The result is that she is often racked with pain.

Lis Key, a worker at the International Animal Rescue, a Sussex-based charity, was first made aware of Mely’s plight when she watched a BBC-TV Panorama documentary about the expansion of palm oil plantations which have devastated the orang-utan’s natural habitat.


Shocked into action: Lis Key is launching an appeal to save Mely after seeing the terrible treatment she received in a TV documentary


The farmers, together with strip-mining firms, have been ruthlessly burning down the rainforest so fast in Borneo and Sumatra that even neighbouring countries are often shrouded in smog.

Many people worry about what this means for climate change. Lis worries about what it means for orang-utans, and focused particularly on Mely. She decided to do anything to free Mely and take her to a specialist sanctuary to recover.

Travelling to Indonesia, Lis found the fisherman, who offered to sell Mely for £300 - but then Lis learned it was illegal to trade in orang-utans. So she was worried that if the charity paid to rescue Mely, it might encourage even more locals to trap vulnerable wild orang-utans and try to sell them as a quick moneyspinner.

Instead, the charity is hoping an Indonesian government-backed forestry officer will be sent to rescue Mely. Meanwhile, Lis is spearheading a crusade to raise funds and expand International Animal Rescue’s rehabilitation centre in Borneo, which is already at full capacity.

Orang-utans are extraordinarily intelligent - sharing 97 per cent of the same DNA as humans.

No doubt, that’s why the indigenous people of Malaysia named them ‘Orang Hutan’ - literally ‘People of the Forest’. In 1900 there were more than 315,000 in the wild, but today there are fewer than 50,000.

As they swing through the forest (their arms stretch six feet from fingertip to fingertip), they let out loud rumbling ‘long calls’ (which can be heard more than a mile away) to make sure they stay out of each other’s way.

They eat mangoes, insects, tree bark and young leaves.


Forlorn attempt: Mely repeatedly picks at the lock with her fingers but it is a vain attempt to escape


Unsuitable: Food given to Mely by the tourists who visit often makes her ill as it not part of her natural diet of angoes, insects, tree bark and young leaves.


Now aged 15, Mely should be in her prime, since orang-utans typically live for 45 years - though the oldest one in captivity lived until 58.

As she waits for rescue, Mely remains chained to a post, picking feebly at the lock with her fingers in the forlorn hope of escape.

‘She’s thin but such an expressive, gentle animal. It breaks my heart to see her there,’ says Lis sadly.

Mely may be one of the great apes. Ironically, all she needs from us is a shred of humanity.

International Animal Rescue, internationalanimalrescue.org, 01825 767688.


source: dailymail