Mujur previously gave birth to two babies in 2019 and 2022, but she did not sufficiently bond with either of them, resulting in their passing. As soon as she became pregnant again, Dublin Zoo’s staff knew that conventional methods wouldn’t cut it, so they decided to stage maternal workshops with human mothers.
“Mujur was extremely interested in watching the women feed their babies through the glass, even mirroring some of their actions,”saidLizzie Reeves, a midwife and lactation specialist who is part of the breastfeeding team at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin and the person responsible for organizing the group.
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A group of 30 women put together a “breastfeeding seminar” for Mujur, an orangutan mom at the Dublin Zoo in Ireland, who had problems feeding her babies in the past
Image credits:Freepik
“A lot of women said: ‘Look, an orangutan doesn’t wear a T-shirt.’ So they whipped off their T-shirts and their bras so Mujur could literally see everything,” Reeves told theIrish Times.
The zoo has since releasedwholesome imagesthat show the orangutan mother watching attentively as one of the volunteers, Nora Murphy, breastfeeds her 10-month-old daughter, Elodi.
“You are going from being a mother yourself to trying to help a mother to be. You would be talking to her saying: ‘Look this is what you are meant to do,’” she said, stating that she’s rooting for the orangutan.
“She would stare at you really looking at what you were doing. She was hand-expressing as time went on, which was magic.”
Image credits:dublinzoo_official
This forced the establishment to make the difficult decision to separate the two and commence bottle-feeding the infant while his mother attended her lessons.
Research shows that the bond between mother and child in orangutans is one of the strongest in the animal kingdom
Image credits:Nora Murphy/nexta_tv
The species’ moms are notorious for being the “champions of breastfeeding,” as they can feed their offspring this way for up to eight years, the longest of any other primate.
Experts explain that the behavior comes as a result of the harsh conditions they’ve evolved into and the rarity of each birth.
“Having a long period of nursing may be a way for juveniles to learn the ins and outs of living in a challenging environment with limited and unpredictable food resources,” explains Tanya Smith, a researcher at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution.
As Orangutans lead solitary lives in thetreetopsof the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, studying without interfering with their habitat can be tricky. Because of this, researchers have turned to bone remains, specifically teeth, to correlate their eating habits with their age.
“Teeth are like a biological hard drive that’s recording what’s happening in your body each day,” the expert explained.
Like trees, teeth have growth rings that provide a timeline of an animal’s life. This, coupled with an analysis of the levels of barium at each stage, indicates when anorangutanwas consuming milk.
Orangutans have evolved to breastfeed their infants for the longest time of all primates as a response to harsh living conditions and food shortages
Image credits:dublinzoo
Theirfindingsconfirmed that the babies maintained a milk-only diet for the first 12 to 18 months of their lives and added fruits and vegetables as they grew, but they never fully weaned off breastfeeding until eight or even nine years had passed.
Using milk as a countermeasure to food scarcity is not exclusive to orangutans, aschimpanzeemothers wean their young at about age 5, whilegorillamoms stop nursing when their offspring are about 4.
Homo sapiens, asrecent studiesexplain, also maintained prolonged periods of breastfeeding for the majority of their hunter-gatherer existence and only started weaning off their infants early when agriculture became the preferred way of life.
Breast milk remains asnutritiousas ever, as it contains thousands of distinct bioactive molecules that protect against infection and inflammation and contribute to immune maturation, organ development, and healthy microbial colonization.
Pasteurized donor milk is commonly provided to high-risk infants, and mothers are encouraged to freeze their milk at some point in lactation for future infant feedings.
“Considering how many women experience post natal depression, this mama is probably experiencing the same thing. It’s so sad seeing primates in zoos,” wrote one reader on Facebook.
“A few years ago I was watching theorangutansat the Melbourne Zoo and there was a breastfeeding mother also watching them. For the entire time she was breastfeeding, an adult female orangutan sat at the window in front of her and watched closely. It was a really beautiful moment,” shared another.
“How cruel and confusing for that poor animal. Probably depressed and sick of being stared at all day long. How selfish human beings are,” pondered one user.
“It’s disappointing it didn’t work and that the infant was removed for bottle feeding,” lamented another.
According to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, Orangutan females have an average offive babiesin their lifetime. Mujur, being a mother of three, may still be blessed with a couple of infants in the future, and she’s now more prepared than ever, thanks to the efforts of Dublin Zoo’s moms.
“What a beautiful gesture!” writes one user, as others join in to congratulate the 30 volunteer mothers for their maternal workshop
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