By Hillary Rosner | NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 1, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Aug 17, 2009

A hundred or so orangutans have just returned from a day at “forest school,” where they learn to find food, use tools and fear snakes. Assembled on a lawn, they act much like any group of kids at recess—congregating in small groups, clocking each other over the head, holding hands, turning somersaults and adroitly climbing a jungle gym. These apes are orphans, having lost their forest homes to palm-oil plantations and their mothers to poachers who sell the babies to an illegal pet trade. A few still bear the marks etched into their necks from the months or years they spent in chains. The staff at the Nyaru Menteng orangutan sanctuary, in Central Kalimantan on the Indonesian side of Borneo, is painstakingly raising the apes, acting as surrogates for orangutan mothers who rear their young for up to eight years. Once they’re old enough and wise enough to survive on their own, the apes move to islands that serve as halfway houses until the animals can be placed back into the jungle.