Orangutans are Asia's great apes and among the most critically threatened primates. Their welfare in the wild is devastated by palm oil deforestation, while rescue and rehabilitation centres care for orphaned individuals in some of the world's most demanding primate welfare programmes.
Orangutan welfare in the wild is catastrophically compromised by habitat destruction and the pet trade. Deforestation forces orangutans into shrinking forest fragments where food availability declines and inter-group conflict increases. Oil palm workers who encounter orangutans in plantations sometimes kill them to prevent crop damage, and orangutans that enter villages or plantations are frequently injured before rescue. Infant orangutans seized from the pet trade arrive at rehabilitation centres deeply traumatised — they have typically witnessed their mother's killing, been transported in appalling conditions, and kept in socially depriving captivity. Rehabilitation is a years-long process of teaching survival skills that would have been transmitted by the mother over a decade of natural development; some individuals never acquire sufficient skills for forest release. The welfare cost to each individual is severe and the scale, while smaller than factory farming, involves animals of great cognitive complexity.