ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Man of the Forest


I’m agile and orange yes I am
I am I am – orang-utan.

I lived in forests lush and green
but of them now no sight is seen.
Palm oil groves now stand where I played,
my food source gone – I am not saved.

You barely see me in the wild -
not father, mother, baby, child.
Have you no care for me at all?
Do palm oil products you enthral?

For they will be the death of me
I’m hunted, captured , killed you see
and soon you won’t see me at all
for I’m a species numbered ‘ small’.

I’m agile and orange yes I am
a desperately endangered orang-utan.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4PM97Tm ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzeRGGXcXcw




Maureen Clifford © 05/11

Tim Tams are off the menu

Humans do some horrible things in the name of progress.


Here here Maureen.

Maybe we are the endangered species Maureen, gorging on all that saturated trans-fats from the palm trees.

Can't help but love them Maureen. It would be a tragedy if we lost them.

When in Thailand a few years ago I visited a Gibbon rehabilitation centre run by volunteers in Phuket. Gibbons are taken as babies for pets and then abused in the most horrible ways - tied up, beaten, one even had its hand cut off.

At the rehabilitation project they are kept in large enclosures and paired up and when they have a baby and form a family group they are eventually released. Some, like the one with the hand cut off need to be kept in captivity. The enclosures are on a steep hill and the animals are desensitised to humans and eventually freed. I wanted to pack my bags and go straight back to volunteer there. I love Gibbons, they are one of the most agile of the apes.

When I was there a python had recently entered one of the cages and eaten a new baby and one of the parents. The other parent was severly traumatised. The volunteers were devastated.

http://www.gibbonproject.org/

It is terrible Heather what we do in the name of so called progress. And what is even worse is how we always seem to justify it. Dave and Caro are frequent visitors to Malaysia as they intend moving there permanently once the boat is finished. They are also saddened at the way animals are treated - they reckon I would never cope with it and would be bringing all the stray dogs home to Oz.

So do we really need to be using this product when the cost is so high to a species so close to our own? The palm oil plantations are everywhere, smoke from burning forests adds to the pollution and all because the western world - that managed for centuries without this additive - now can't seem to get enough of it.

Orang-utans foraging for food where once their forests were, are killed by the farmers, often caught in traps and left in blazing hot sun for days without water only to then be beaten to death or hacked to pieces with machetes. Babies are torn from their mothers arms and see their Mothers killed. They are then sold, totally traumatized, on an illegal black market unless lucky??? enough to be found by the refuges.

If you care, think before you buy. Lobby your local politician, spread the word to friends and families - because most people don't know or understand what using and eating products that contain palm oil is doing to our great primates. Just remember that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

The orang-utans are becoming very close to extinction. Can we really afford to lose yet another species from earth? Do we want to?

Only people power will stem the tide and we are the people - close relatives to the men in the forest.