Adopt orangutan Kenaya

Kenaya’s Story

In the summer of 2019, a villager cutting trees on a hill in West Borneo came across a baby orangutan, all alone. She was around a year old. Instead of being returned to the forest, she was taken back to the village, where for four long months she was kept with a chain around her neck, tied to a tree beside a pigsty. The hill where she was found later gave her a name: Kenaya.

When local villagers reported her, our team travelled to Krio Hulu village with officials from the local wildlife authority to bring her into our care. Like almost every baby orangutan kept as a pet, Kenaya would have lost her mother to get there. Young orangutans stay with their mothers until they are six to eight years old, and a mother will never give up her baby while she is alive.

Kenaya arrived at our centre in Ketapang with a skin disease and a suspected respiratory illness. She spent eight weeks in quarantine, where our medical team treated her and helped her regain her strength. Within a few months her skin had healed and she was back to a healthy weight.

The frightened baby who was once chained to a tree has now spent years growing up in our care. Today she lives on Monkey Island with six other orangutans, and spends almost all of her time high in the trees, rarely coming down to the ground. When the medical team visits, she climbs a tall tree and watches them from a distance, which is exactly the wariness of people she’ll need in the wild. She forages for her own food, naps in the treetops and spends time with her friends Uka and Vena, learning foraging and nest-building skills from the older orangutans around her.