One Casualty of the Palm Oil Industry: An Orangutan Mother, Shot 74 Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/world/asia/orangutan-indonesia-palm-oil.html

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

106 72 7 years ago

nytimes.com

wolco• 7 years ago

Palm oil tastes awful and its not the healthiest choice.

chewz4• 7 years ago

It is used as biofuel..

Falling3• 7 years ago

It's also a very common food ingredient.

Railsify3• 7 years ago

As well as many other things, have you heard of Nutella?

thinkindie• 7 years ago

unfortunately it's being used in a lot of processed food. Nutella is among the most famous but if you carefully read food labels you'll see being used in a lot of more cases (sometimes it might go under a more generic vegetables fats). In Italy there was a big attempt to steer away from palm oil (at least in words) while in other countries it's not something felt at all: for example I live in Germany where you can hardly see any "palm oil free" ribbon on products.

rolltiide2• 7 years ago

wow they can take 74 shots and live

It would be interesting if humans could have tougher skin layers like many mammals do

fnord772• 7 years ago

they were airgun pellets which embedded into her body as shown by the x-rays in the article

rolltiide2• 7 years ago

oh, whoops!

I had only read the part at the beginning that made it clear she was alive

radicalbyte• 7 years ago

Those slugs were from an air rifle, not a proper gun.

fnord772• 7 years ago

When the air-gun pellets pierced Hope’s eyes, blinding her, she felt her way up the tree trunks, auburn-furred fingers searching out tropical fruit for sustenance.
By the end, Hope’s torso was slashed with deep lacerations. Multiple bones were broken. Seventy-four pellets were lodged in her body. Her months-old baby had been ripped away.

wpq0• 7 years ago

This sad story reminds me of this excerpt from the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn: “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.”

We are waging a war on our brothers and sisters. Our collective humanity deteriorate for each and every soul that we trample upon for the sake of economic progress.

negamax• 7 years ago

This is so well put. Also waging war part or politics or nepotism in competing, corrupts the spirit of competition and hence the human spirit itself.

andy-x• 7 years ago

It's not even a progress, it is _growth_.

gambiting• 7 years ago

To everyone commenting how we should stop using palm oil - please be reminded that just 20 years ago the international community was banding up to urgently encourage switching from other types of vegetable oils to palm oil, as it is the most efficient type of vegetable oil to produce(per hectare of land used). Yes, the situation in those countries sucks and should be stopped - but we have a need for vegetable oils, and they all have a cost associated with them.

NeedMoreTea3• 7 years ago

I don't remember a concerted push outside industry to switch, more a push by the multinationals. Mainly because it's so cheap. Historically it was usually used in soap and lubricants rather than food as it has the distinctive texture.

I do remember that environmental groups have been complaining of its impact since the 90s - maybe far longer.

pvaldes• 7 years ago

we have a need for vegetable oils

Fortunately we have easy solutions to fulfill this need that don't need to distroy climate safety, lose hundred of thousands of rainforest services and products, and to burn a lot of fuel. All just to import palm oil from the other coin of the planet, Indonesia none less.

We can culture in-situ sunflower fields, or olive oil, maize oil, rapeseed oil, Camellia oil, peanut oil, apricot, almond and apple seed oil, carob oil, avocado oil, poppyseed oil, flax, soy... some of those are even byproducts of current activities.

We could save orangutans in zoos, but millions of invisible plants, lichens, insects, frogs and birds aren't so fortunate

asokoloski2• 7 years ago

It's more of a desire for oils than a need. Humans don't need to eat processed oils at all. We can get all the essential fatty acids we need from regular food -- even without eating fish. Oils are not even healthy, they're just concentrated calories. It's just that they taste good.

As far as for other uses of vegetable oils, I can't really comment.

erikpukinskis• 7 years ago

What is are examples of cuisines that use no oils?

asokoloski2• 7 years ago

Hmm, you know what, I've been researching this a bit more and it seems like I was wrong. Apparently many cultures did boil seeds to produce oils for cooking or other purposes. I expect that they probably didn't eat as much oil as we do, given that this would have been more labor intensive than what we can do with modern farming and factories. But it makes sense to try to get your calories any way you can.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

It's just that they taste good.

I don't know about others, but I don't really care about the taste of oil. My main use of oil is to lubricate so food doesn't stick to pans (non-stick coating doesn't completely eliminate this need) and also to penetrate food and aid in its thorough cooking.

I can live without oil, but, for example, that means I cannot make fried eggs, scrambled eggs, or omelettes. I can only think of making hard-boiled eggs, or poached eggs. Not using oil really seems to limit options.

Also, I don't think this is a problem limited to oil. It's probably a problem with most parts of our food sourcing.

There's also lots to be heard on the animal cruelty done to chickens in the interest of efficiency and bringing down costs for the production of eggs and chicken meat. For example, they're supposedly put in cages too small to stretch, and their beaks are broken to avoid them killing each other out of desperation[1]. From the source I referenced:

Since birds crowded like this commonly go mad and peck one another to death, these birds were debeaked, a practice whereby workers grab baby chicks in one hand and thrust their beaks between hot, steaming blades. Workers cut off anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of chicks’ beaks while they’re fully conscious. The industry calls this “trimming their beaks.” But slicing chickens’ beaks off with a heated blade or a scissor device, as is frequently done, is not like trimming your nails. Birds’ beaks are sensitive, highly innervated and able to feel pain and other sensations. It would be like having your toes cut off without anesthesia. Not only do chickens rely on their beaks for many functions, having their beaks severed causes them immense, acute, and, often, lifelong pain.

Maybe I should just stop eating eggs altogether.

Really, maybe I should just go vegan.

[1] https://www.salon.com/2019/04/20/i-studied-factory-farms-for...

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

I can live without oil, but, for example, that means I cannot make fried eggs, scrambled eggs, or omelettes. I can only think of making hard-boiled eggs, or poached eggs. Not using oil really seems to limit options.

You don't need oil, you just need a better non-stick pan.

digitalni• 7 years ago

Are we the baddies?

dang• 7 years ago

Probably, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Bakary• 7 years ago

Tragic as it is I feel this piece illustrates the idea of bourgeois sentimentalism quite well.[0]

Some animals get a ton of support and money thrown at them while less marketable animals tend to produce no reaction when treated horrifically.

Whenever there is a tension between a group of poor locals and first world emotional interest around ecological conservation, the problem is that the locals can sense quite clearly (as the father does at the end of the piece) how little their lives are valued compared to that of animals. You can have a non-human species get a Swiss surgeon flown in, while they would never experience this level of medical care of attention themselves.

I'm certainly not condoning the horrific actions towards those animals, but underneath that tragedy there is a bigger issue at hand and a big reason why certain ecological projects fail due to zero interest in incentivizing locals. The best conservation programs tend to involve the entire community.

In the end you have frustrated first worlders wondering why the locals won't cooperate and do as they are told, even though the reason for this lack of interest is precisely the barely concealed contempt that emanates towards them. Sending trash in the guise of recycling, pollution and outsourcing negative externalities their way such as the palm oil industry while forbidding them from doing whatever might have a negative externality on first worlders.

[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1881/12/25.htm

4ntonius8lock• 7 years ago

Thank you for stating so eloquently what I feel.

Having grown up in the third world, and now living in the first, I get the very distinct feeling of people in the first world wanting to push away the latter they used to rise up, since it is 'dirty'.

Not to say I support the barbarism mentioned in the article.

monktastic1• 7 years ago

This is such an important point that's easy to lose sight of. It's so easy to imagine ourselves as better than others; all the more so when those others live lives unfathomably different from our own. On that note, I want to share a favorite quote of mine, about the burgeoning of empathy via psychedelics:

"My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity."

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 7 years ago

Environmentalism and endangered species protection is the new colonialism. Rich white people impose their values on poor brown people and try to prevent them from doing the same things that they did to develop, and rather try to keep them as the “noble savages” living in a “pristine wilderness.”

sho• 7 years ago

The "brown" owners of these palm oil plantations, sitting in their luxury condos and villas in Jakarta and KL, are much richer than you, believe me.

ossie• 7 years ago

When Malaysia and Indonesia overtook West Africa in producing palm oil due to an "efficient" focus on large scale plantations, we decried it as another sign of Africa's regression, and in Nigeria's specific case, a sign of petro-dollar's damaging impact on a previously robust agro-economy.

Holistic Progress = Undefined.

howlin2• 7 years ago

Palm oil became a thing when cheap, shelf stable fats in the form of partially hydrogenated oil were realized to be unhealthy. Instead of the world giving up the eternally fresh package of Oreos, we move to massive production of tropical oils which are also shelf stable. It's probably time to reevaluate if we can sustain our appetite for snacks using a very small amount of precious land in the tropics that can grow palm oil.

There are alternatives to Palm oil. The most straightforward is replacing it with rendered fat from pigs or cows (lard or tallow). This has its own ethics and environmental concerns. Another solution is to revisit oil hydrogenation. We can fully hydrogenate oils such as soybean into a saturated fat very similar to that found in tallow. The resulting fat is healthier than partially hydrogenated oil, and arguably healthier than unprocessed soy oil too. It is not difficult to work with and has a neutral flavors, which is desirable for the processed food industry. We just need to get over our fear of this process.

rayiner• 7 years ago

Just go back to lard and tallow. McDonalds French fries are still a shadow of their former selves.

howlin2• 7 years ago

A significant fraction of the population has a religious or moral objection to eating lard. A smaller but still substantial part of the population objects to tallow based on vegetarianism or the terrible environmental impact of cattle raising.

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

The same thing has ruined potato chips. All the good chip brands in this country now have limited regional distribution at best. The tyranny of Frito-Lay has totally ruined the chip industry.

dewey• 7 years ago

I didn't really know about this until I listend to this great podcast episode about the whole fries story. Can highly recommend it: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/19-mcdonalds-broke-my...

(The rest of Revisionist History is also great!)

NeedMoreTea3• 7 years ago

Just about everyone's chips (fries) and crisps (chips!) are a shadow of their former selves. When I was a kid just about everyone made their chips and crisps in beef dripping or lard. Now not even all supermarkets carry it, all bags of crisps use veggie oil, and the only place we get decent chips is at home.

Yet beef consumption has risen hugely over the same timescales.

fucking_tragedy• 7 years ago

Palmitic acid consumption is also associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease.

pergadad2• 7 years ago

I find it hard to impossible to avoid palmoil in food. I eat vegetarian/vegan, which makes it even more difficult. To just mention the most frustrating/difficult to avoid one: to find margarine that doesn't use palmoil seems near impossible.

And it's in everything 'ready' - cookies, bread, chocolate, curry sauce, any ready meal, any fastfood you buy, ...

Alternative oils such as sunflower or rapeseed oils should be able to (and used to!) cover most of these use cases, but sadly our food industry seems to choose palmoil despite the ecological damage (rainforest destruction, monocultures, erosion, ...) and the widely reported slavery and social harm. Some companies (such as Ferrero) slap 'certificates' of non-harm on the package, which have little evidence behind them and, if anything, will still mean that the demand for palm oil keeps increasing.

Really disappointing. Hope companies become more conscious rather than just cost-conscious.

spockz• 7 years ago

In Italy, there seems to be a whole campaign against palm oil. Many product wrappers, including those of margarine, claim to be free of palm oil in quite a big font. So at least in Italy there is awareness. I do not know what prompted this.

weddpros• 7 years ago

There's often palm oil in your car's fuel too which is why its culture is so extensive: it will be hard to avoid, and you'll burn more in your car than you can eat...

xenocyon• 7 years ago

There's also the little matter of the sheer magnitude of the threat to the species: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/15/dramatic...

One Casualty of the Palm Oil Industry: An Orangutan Mother, Shot 74 Times

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