Orangutan Hybrid, Bred to Save Species, Now Seen as Pollutant
IGNORE the absurd nickname Junior: this scowling, hulking he-ape, his fur like flame and his belly like Buddha's, his face ostentatiously swollen with the fatty cheek flaps and throat sac of a fully mature male, is not the sort to elicit clucks and kootchie-koos from the human primates who watch him through the Plexiglas of his zoo enclosure. As the oldest male orangutan at the National Zoo (29 years old in April), and the father of five other orangutans here, Junior looks the perfectly feral ambassador for his species, the Great Red Ape, a piece of the jungle caged but never conquered. In fact, Junior, or Atjeh as he is more formally named, is an entirely zoo-made creation, a version of orangutan that almost certainly would never be found in the forests of Indonesia, the ape's native home. He and about 80 other orangutans in captivity around the country are zoo-bred crosses between two subspecies of orangutans, those originating in Borneo and those from the neighboring island of Sumatra. They are called hybrids, or "cocktail orangutans," or simply mutts, and they are history.
