||| Marison Guciano |||
An orangutan with a particular dirty habit has animal rights activists up in arms after the simian <a href="https://youtu.be/Y62xvlTBoz4">picked up a lit cigarette and started puffing</a>. The giant orangutan seemed like it was no stranger to smoking and picked the habit right up.
The incident started when a visitor flicked his lit cigarette into the orangutan's enclosure at Bandung Zoo in Indonesia. Zoo staff says the guard may have been taking a break at the time the cigarette was thrown and called the incident regrettable.
A spokesperson for the zoo named Sulhan said, "There's actually a sign at the location which says visitors are not allowed to give food and cigarettes to the animals."
Marison Guciano, the founder of the Indonesia Animal Welfare Society, condemned the zoo's management for "weak control" but also called out all zoos for a lack of welfare standards. "Almost all zoos are in poor condition… from the cages and feeding needs to the animals' health," Guciano said.
<img src="https://media.8ch.net/file_store/b25a1076de504e6b05341d2c6757e9b5ce523022049e48d0ab91d116252df49d.jpg" style="max-height:640px;max-width:360px;">
<span style="margin-top:15px;rgba(42,51,6,0.7);font-size:12px;">Credit: Scorpion Wildlife Trade Monitoring Group</span>
There have been calls from activists to shut down the zoo after online footage showed visibly thin sun bears at Bandung begging for food from visitors. This was not the first time apes have been seen smoking in zoos. An orangutan named Tori at the Taru Jurug zoo in central Java learned to smoke in 2012 after picking up cigarette butts from visitors.
In order to prevent Tori from accessing cigarettes, they zoo moved the 15-year-old orangutan's enclosure out of reach of visitors. In 2010, a South African chimpanzee named Charlie became famous for smoking.
Staff tried to get Charlie to quite for years but he took the habit to the grave with him at the age of 52.
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>Died at 52
Charlie lived an pretty long life doing what he loved