Many years ago I stopped by a zoo in France, with my 7mo son.<p>I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller.<p>I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood.<p>The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure.<p>Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.
Obviously orangutans are much smarter as a species, they are know to pass down knowledge/behaviors, including tool usage, down generations. But there could be more to this behavior. A dog instinctively knows to eat grass when they have stomach issues and Alaskan Bears eat certain plants to expel parasites after hibernation. How do they know? Zoopharmacognosy is a fascinating subject that needs more research.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoopharmacognosy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoopharmacognosy</a>
One of the most adorable TV shows I’ve seen is “Orangutan Jungle School” about the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation’s orangutan rescue/rehabilitation/release program. The series is available on a number of streaming services and many clips on YouTube.<p><a href="https://orangutanjungleschool.com/" rel="nofollow">https://orangutanjungleschool.com/</a>
Did that self-administered plant-based treatment have an orangutan-FDA EUA authorization? What does the Cochrane study on wound-treatment with leaves say? Was there publication bias on successful trials of wound leaf treatment? Was the funnel plot of orangutan wound-leaf treatment studies asymmetric or symmetric? Was the relative risk less than 1? Is the orangutan p-hacking (were there 19 other orangutans who applied the same species leaf to their wound with no effect, and this orangutan kept them from the BBC's cameras)? If the orangutan was basing its experiment off animal-model studies of _homo sapiens_, how well should it expect those studies to carry over to Pongo pygmaeus? Did a supplement manufacturer fund the orangutan's trial? Wasn't it dangerous for the orangutan to self-administer based on some non-peer-reviewed preprint (s)he probably read online somewhere? Why were preprints allowed to be viewable by it, given the hazard of self-administering that viewing posed? The orangutan should have left its wound untreated until it, its peers, all the orangutan organizations offering standard-of-care wound treatments, and their regulators had completed analyzing all the results of all the independent clinical trials in one comprehensive meta-study. (If there had been any clinical trials undertaken while the meta study was being analyzed, then make that two comprehensive meta-studies, and hope they don't result in a tie. If the leaf treatment worked, we wouldn't be calling it a leaf, we would call it medicine.<p>Pssh total pseudoscientist orangutan stuck in some institution-distrusting online subculture bubble.
It would be nice if they could work out what this "medicinal" tree is and start mass-producing this paste because that looks like some serious healing going on there! ... or perhaps orangutans are just way better at this sort of thing that human are? I recently tripped up running and had a much smaller cut (compared to the apparent missing-chunk-of-flesh this orangutan had) on my knee that took several weeks to fully heal.<p>I'd pay for this paste!
Is this actually new? See here: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-16621-w" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-16621-w</a> - discussed here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669593">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669593</a><p>It's even been in Wild Kratts!
In the South of Brazil, Howler monkeys have been found to chew a plant and put it in wounds.<p>The plant was then analysed and it really has healing properties.
I know I'm humanizing Rakus here but I'd like to think that, when he kisses the tree towards the end of the video, he does so out of gratitude for helping him. :-)