Thursday, March 25, 2010

ORANGUTANS

(this is a wild boy orangutan we saw on the Kinabatangan River)

Two years ago my teacher, Miss Watters, started up a study on orangutans.



We learnt about how their rain forest was getting taken over by palm oil plantations. And we decided to do something about it.


So we did a bit of research and we found out that people were destroying their rain forests for money, and mistreating the animals very badly.

My family sponsored an orangutan called Elisa in Borneo.

We did a class performance about it.

And when i went home i started to raid my cupboard for stuff that has palm oil in. I found lots of stuff. It was very surprising.

It made me feel very angry and it made me stop eating palm oil stuff. We replaced lots of the products with palm oil in, for ones that didn't have any.

We decided to go on a family holiday to Malaysia. We went on a very cool jungle camp and we saw 5 wild orangutans. Wild orangutans are supposed to become extinct in 3 years because people are still buying palm oil and are not aware of what it does.

I have heard that for every cup of milo drunk 7 orangutans die. This is because of unsustainable palm oil. Nestle is very bad.

We wrote to Cadburys who say they have sustainable palm which is good.

It is not only food it is also used in cremes like Garnier.

I will come back later and do a list of good and bad palm oil foods.