PLANTATION Industries and Commodities Minister Datuk Zuraida Kamaruddin’s defence of palm oil in Malaysia, including her assertion that they were not harming the orangutan population and that the primates were more likely to kill humans than the other way around, has drawn flak on social media.
The minister said this at the Malaysian Palm Oil Council’s 2022 seminar and dialogue on Jan 5, but an excerpt had began circulating on TikTok recently and the clip was subsequently shared by PKR vice-president and former Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli.
“In Malaysia, if you see an orangutan, it will kill you first, not you kill the orangutan first, right?” she said during her speech.
She went on to say that the wildlife and national parks department (Perhilitan) did not simply kill orangutans, tigers and lions, and had a policy of rendering the animals unconscious first before taking them to the zoo.
According to user @MahamoodMubarak, the “betul tak (right?)” that Zuraida had uttered screamed of insecurity and desperate need for approval as she herself did not know what she was talking about.
User @nazrivovinski sarcastically said:
(I think Zuraida must have thought that the movie Planet of the Apes is a documentary)
Meanwhile, user @tpisyu asked in jest if there were cases of people being killed by orangutans in Malaysia.
“Come on Zuraida, show us the statistics!” the user cajoled.
An irritated @beb0808 went on to opine:
User @RayvincentRyan further remarked that orangutans behave more decently than human beings:
User @FroggyWaduhek meanwhile demanded that Zuraida stop spewing nonsense:
(Please stop, makcik. You are simply speaking nonsense without having any actual knowledge. Please just sit at home to eat, sleep and look after your grandchildren. But just ‘look after’ and not ‘educate’ or else your grandchildren’s science subject will get an ‘F’)
Exposing our ignorance to nature
Meanwhile, user @JuneRubis, in a series of tweets, opined that orangutans have more to fear from men than vice versa.
The user, a native Sarawakian and former orangutan biologist who have worked in the field from Sarawak to Central Kalimantan went on to note that Perhilitan has no jurisdiction in Sabah and Sarawak and that their powers are limited only to Peninsular Malaysia.
“I also have experience with captive orangutans who are displaced because of plantations and orangutans that people fear most are the ones who have had contact with men.
“Sadly, they are often locked up. Truly wild orangutans [who are] left alone avoid humans as much as they can.”
The user further noted that while she is sympathetic to how the West have bigoted views about “global South countries and their limited causes they advocate for”, promoting ideas that primates are dangerous to humans “exposes our own ignorance to nature”.
“As Malaysians, we have so much to learn from native communities who have co-existed with orangutans [and] tigers for centuries before widespread deforestation and industrialization have irrevocably changed landscapes and populations,” she added.
“Perhaps alongside with oil palm production being taught in schools, we can also teach political ecology, globalisation, political economy, our native cultures, science and languages from a [non-anthropological perspective] to students so they can be better equipped to handle the future.” – Jan 20, 2022
