This Orangutan Has Bad Habits

In 2018, a video emerged of an Orangutan smoking in captivity. Filmed in an Indonesian zoo, a young man throws his part-smoked cigarette into the Orangutan’s enclosure, at which point the mammal picks it up and starts smoking. This hard-to-watch video made it to AP News, who ran the story. We soon discovered that the privately owned Bandung Zoo has a regrettable reputation for mistreating animals. An online petition drew over 1 million signatures calling for the zoo’s closure. There’s nothing about highly intelligent Orangutans that makes us feel uncomfortable; after all, they share almost 97% of our genes. But we’re definitely uneasy about this poor gentle creature’s treatment.
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