Tungga Dewi Hastomo Putri (1130-30-8833)

1. Most interesting wildlife problem in Indonesia

In my opinion, orangutan plays an important role not only in forest ecosystems but affecting national
economic trade as well. Indonesia has three species of orangutan, two of them: Tapanuli orangutan or
Pongo tapanuliensis and Sumatran orangutan or Pongo abelii can be found in Sumatera island, while
Kalimantan orangutan or Pongo pygmaeus distributed in Kalimantan a.k.a Borneo island (Nowak et al.
2017a, b, Ancrenaz et al. 2018). Orangutan becomes a wide-known issue after several media reported
how tragic humankind treat them. Besides their declining population due to hunting activity, which in
fact they were the only great apes in the Asian region, they do have a massive habitat loss as well. This
habitat declining was caused by land forest degradation, conversion, and fragmentation. Orangutan is
basically arboreal primate, which rely on big and tall tree to hold their heavyweight. They use trees as
their tools to move during their travel to find food, mates or expanding their territories, and use trees to
build their nests as they sleep on it every night. Big, tall, and continuous canopy, which can only be
found in natural forest or old age secondary forest, thus hold important aspect in orangutan life. Yet this
past decades, compatible trees as orangutan needs are decreasing along with forest cover.
Unfortunately, habitat orangutan in Kalimantan and Sumatera is overlapping with Indonesian main
agricultural commodity: palm oil (Wich et al. 2011). Palm oil is the main cause for peatland conversion
and the second major cause for lowland conversion. That is one cause related to habitat loss, another
problem is hunting. As habitat orangutan are declining, wherein other area fragmented, orangutan loss
its nature behavioral of traveling. Although recent studies prove that they can adapt with this situation,
and change their movement from arboreal to terrestrial, it takes many years so that this information
could be spread among communities, and during those years, many orangutans died because they
cannot find foods nor survived with a different condition (Davis et al. 2018). Mortality cause of
orangutan is mainly due to wildlife conflict with palm oil farmers, or labors. Most cases are orangutan
step into the palm oil, eat the fruit, and thus in order to avoid worse scenario such as crop failure, which
can continue to dismissal, physical injury of getting fight by orangutan, or worse killed by orangutan,
humans just take an impulsive way, ‘killed them before they killed us.’. This case is not a single case.
Thousands of them are occurring every month every year in hundreds of companies, not yet a hundred
cases of baby orangutan illegal trading. Orangutan has a low rate of birth. Just like another great ape, it
takes a longer period of a birth interval, unless, it is the slowest of all primates, average once every eight
years. So yes, as what many NGOs do, put the blame on palm oil is the simplest way, but maybe not
really the suitable way. on the other hand, palm oil contribution to Indonesia is vital. Along with mining
products, and rubber in the forestry sector, palm oil responsible for 10% of total national export, thus
regarded as the main agricultural commodity of Indonesia (The World Bank 2018). Views from the
economic sector, palm oil are succeeded to opens up employment for more than 5 million people from
Sumatera to Papua, and thus makes Indonesia as the biggest exporter of palm oil in the world (Ministry
of Agriculture 2017). Yet, a few years ago EU’s proposition to stop crude palm oil out of their imports,
nor its derivative products, do makes Indonesia in a challenging situation. EU is one of the major export
destination of palm oil and other palm oil derivative products, at least until now the black campaign of
environmental destruction caused by palm oil, is spreading among EU countries. This is indeed, a harsh
reflection of bad palm oil management in Indonesia. Regardless of conservation project and a
presidential moratorium in response to palm oil issue in Indonesia, dealing with economic matters such
as this, there always be a political concern in behind (Kehutanan 2017, President of Republic Indonesia
2018). Trade competition, corrupted local stakeholders, illegal company, unclear permit, and the
unsupervised project always drive a major social issue, commonly in developing countries. Orangutan
problem is real, and it means there is big chances to use it as a political agenda. Solving orangutan
problem, and other wildlife as well, is never going to be successful if we only see it on a single aspect,
many overlapping intentions are existing, thus many involved sectors are necessary to sit together and
give their best opinion to frame the solution.

2. How to solve the deer problem in Japan or Taiwan

According to my view, a combination of fencing and continuous culling could be one option. Good
mapping among plant dispersal need to be established and rotating scheduled open-close fence in one
area could be implemented in order to prevent the deer to clear off the surface layer (Takatsuki 2009).
However, monitoring with urban wildlife population is might be a harder way, but more suitable way, in
term of long-term effect, because killing forest habitats wildlife population could someday push the
population to consider that the forest is no longer safe place to live with, and thus could drive them to
move into urban area and makes further problem. However, considering the nutrition level of the urban
deer population could be troublesome. Since they could eat any human-related waste items, we could
not guarantee that their health is qualified enough to be consumed (McCleery et al. 2014). Therefore,
providing foot patch near the forest might worth to try, combined with surgery birth control of
dominant individuals might control the population and drives the deer come back to the forest as well,
and thus might make the deer health enough to be killed or consumed. The policies might be different
among regions, and a combination of policy on each local government depending on each problem has
to be done in accordance to deal with other scenarios the deer might take. In rural areas, where the big
town is quite distant with deer range, a combination of plantation fence and killing the deer inside the
forest is possible.

3. A policy that is most important to realize the society coexisting with wildlife

It might be varied depends on problems and community-related. Some action could be taken, starting
from decreasing level of human-wildlife interaction by explaining or informing about how serious and
crucial human-wildlife conflict could come about. Yet money subsidy from the government to deal with
crops plantation versus wildlife has to be allocated, in case of worst scenario destruction occur. Another
concept that might could help is put animal behavior and distribution in concern (Honda et al. 2018). For
some species with low cognitive learning, changes in behavior might not be swift, but for an animal with
the high possibility of cognitive learning such as primates, learning their rapid changes is next level. One
of the examples of unique behavior is long-tailed monkey (Macaca fascicularis) in Java island, Indonesia,
where they response to low quality habitat and threat of their group safety by increasing their breed
rate. In this case, killing considerable numerous of individuals might not affect the population size, and
their super cognitive level of learning from the past, makes the farmers to always find a new strategy to
hold them from destroying the whole crops. Another concern is home range, or movement. Wildlife
move in a specific pattern in a specific range, although it could be changed due to environmental
changes, it doesn’t mean that we could not write it into a model (Erhart and Overdorff 2008). However,
for canopy cover dependent, building a forest barrier, or buffer or corridor could be one solution. To
prevent wildlife to enter the human settlement, we must provide an adequate area for them to travel,
find food, and find a mate. Thus, for a fragmented forest condition, forest patch could connect between
one patch to the other. In case of overpopulated destructive wildlife, culling the dominant or bold
individuals might give them deterrent effect as the instruction to not to do something.

References

Ancrenaz, M., M. Gumal, A. J. Marshall, E. Meijaard, S. A. Wich, and S. Husson. 2018. Pongo pygmaeus,
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Davis, V. A., R. I. Holbrook, T. Burt, and D. Perera. 2018. The in fl uence of locomotory style on three-
dimensional spatial learning. Animal Behaviour 142:39–47. Elsevier Ltd.
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.06.002>.

Erhart, E. M., and D. J. Overdorff. 2008. Spatial Memory During Foraging in Prosimian Primates:
Propithecus edwardsi and Eulemur fulvus rufus. Folia Primatologica 79:185–196.

Honda, T., H. Iijima, J. Tsuboi, and K. Uchida. 2018. A review of urban wildlife management from the
animal personality perspective: The case of urban deer. Science of the Total Environment 644:576–
582. Elsevier B.V. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.06.335>.

Kehutanan, D. 2017. Strategi dan Rencana Aksi Konservasi Orangutan Indonesia.

McCleery, R. A., C. E. Moorman, and M. N. Peterson. 2014. Urban wildlife conservation: Theory and
practice. Urban Wildlife Conservation: Theory and Practice.

Ministry of Agriculture. 2017. TREE CROP ESTATE STATISTICS OF INDONESIA 2015-2017.

Nowak, M. G., P. Rianti, S. A. Wich, E. Meijaard, and G. Fredriksson. 2017a. Pongo abelii. The IUCN Red
List of Threatened Species 2017. 8235:e.T120588639A120588662.

Nowak, M. G., P. Rianti, S. A. Wich, E. Meijaard, and G. Fredriksson. 2017b. Pongo tapanuliensis. The
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2017. 8235:e.T120588639A120588662.

President of Republic Indonesia. 2018. Inpres-Moratorium-Sawit-2018-.pdf.

Takatsuki, S. 2009. Effects of sika deer on vegetation in Japan: A review. Biological Conservation
142:1922–1929. Elsevier Ltd. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2009.02.011>.

The World Bank. 2018. Menuju Pertumbuhan Inklusif.

Wich, S., Riswan, J. Jenson, J. Refisch, and C. Nellemann. 2011. Orangutans and the Economics of
Sustainable Forest Management in Sumatra. UNEP/GRASP/ PanEco/YEL/ICRAF/GRID-Arendal.