Orangutans are critically endangered due to deforestation for palm oil and logging. Rehabilitation programs rescue orphans, but forest protection remains the essential long-term intervention.
Orangutans experience welfare harms that span from the death and separation trauma of infants whose mothers are killed during deforestation or bushmeat hunting, through the years of rehabilitation in sanctuaries, to the challenges of reintroduction into degraded and fragmented forest. Sanctuary rehabilitation programs provide excellent individual animal care but represent a response to symptoms rather than causes. Wild orangutans in remaining forest experience chronic stress from habitat loss that reduces territory quality, food availability, and safe movement corridors. Forest protection is therefore simultaneously a welfare and conservation intervention; every hectare of forest preserved prevents the chain of welfare harms that follows its loss.