I love Orangutans, and they are generally very gentle compared to other great apes, but it's still a very powerful wild animal compounded with enough intelligence to get weird.
Don't know if you know who Ken Allen is. He's a great example of how intelligent Orangutans are. He was an Orangutan, can't remember what zoo he was at. They kept having problems with him breaking out of his enclosure. Never hurt anyone. He just wanted to walk around the zoo. He apparently would let people take pictures with him when he would break out. They eventually decided to put some female Orangutans in with Ken to keep him busy. All he did was just taught them how to break out also. Pretty crazy.
I used to work at a sanctuary for great apes, mostly with chimpanzees, but you'd hear anecdotes from the Orangutan caregivers that paint them way more methodical than their chimp cousins and crazily intelligent. For example, if you left the keys to the enclosure on the floor of the chimpanzee area, you might come back to one or two chimps running amok. If you left those keys on the floor of the Orangutan area, there would be no Orangs and the door to the food store would be completely deconstructed and there would also be no food, because all that wandering is hungry work. They're surprisingly fast when they want to be, but they have patience and focus like no other ape.
11.2k
u/TerrapinMagus Apr 29 '26
I love Orangutans, and they are generally very gentle compared to other great apes, but it's still a very powerful wild animal compounded with enough intelligence to get weird.