Many poets and scientists believe a mother’s love for her child is the strongest love there is, and Sofia, a 12-year-old Bornean orangutan at Brookfield Zoo, seems intent on proving that theory.
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Three weeks ago, Sofia gave birth to Kutai (pronounced koo-TIE). Thursday morning, she and Kutai’s father, Ben, for the first time brought the infant female into the public viewing gallery of the zoo’s Tropic World Asian exhibit from their private, off-view cage.
Still cameras clicked, television cameras whirred and zoo visitors cooed as the mother climbed artificial vines and trees of the habitat, baby clinging to her breast. Posing from various perches, she alternately gazed tenderly at her baby and looked up proudly at the public gallery.
It was a far different picture than the one Sofia presented three years ago when she gave birth to a baby in the San Diego Zoo.
Born in the California zoo and “hand-raised” by human keepers, Sofia simply didn’t know how to be a mother to her first child. She rejected that baby, forcing San Diego zookeepers to retrieve, bottle-feed and raise it themselves.
Knowing her history, Brookfield keepers began putting Sofia through a remarkable series of parenting exercises since she arrived here on loan from San Diego in July 1992.
The success of the animal parenting classes, invented by the Brookfield staff for Sofia, already has attracted the attention of other zoos keeping orangutans.
“We had no idea what would work when we first began the training,” said Nava Greenblatt, a senior keeper at Tropic World. “The plan simply evolved as we went along.”
The keepers used an animal-training technique called positive reinforcement, first developed by marine mammal keepers to train and care for captive dolphins and whales. It is a method of using favorite foods and loving attention to reward animals for learning and adopting desired behaviors taught by the keepers.
Tropic World keepers first tried the method a few years ago when two elderly orangutans at the zoo, Sam and Katie, developed diabetes. In a gradual process, the keepers taught the animals to come to the front of their cage and present their arms for painful daily insulin injections.
“When we found out Sofia was coming to our zoo, we immediately thought of using the same training to teach her maternal behaviors,” Greenblatt said.
Sofia and Ben, a 14-year-old Bornean orangutan born and raised by his own mother at the Omaha zoo, were paired and sent to Brookfield 14 months ago by the international Species Survival Plan committee for orangutans.
They immediately took to each other, and Sofia became pregnant last November.
In normal circumstances, a newborn orangutan pretty much clings to and is carried by its mother constantly for the first two years of its life. With Sofia’s sorry history of motherhood, zoo officials didn’t know what to expect.
Hoping to teach her at least to carry the baby, the keepers started by rewarding Sofia for picking up and carrying, on command, an empty plastic bleach bottle. Later they substituted stuffed toys, such as a Bugs Bunny doll.
Not knowing if she would ever nurse, the trainers taught her to bring the dolls to the cage front when they called, holding it like a baby that could be bottle-fed through the cage mesh, if necessary.
But they also taught her to nestle against the cage front so that they could reach through the mesh and stroke her body, mimicking as best they could a clinging, nursing orangutan baby. They wanted Sofia conditioned to their touch and, later, surrogate dolls seeking out her breasts and nipples.
“She had never been around or seen a nursing mother,” Greenblatt said, “and we were concerned that she might find a nursing baby to be so irritating or painful that she would reject it.”
For good measure, the keepers put Ben through an identical training regimen except for the nursing exercises, even though male orangutans normally have nothing to do with child-rearing.
“We were willing to try anything, in the event Sofia ignored this baby, too,” Greenblatt said.
Normally, Sofia and Ben were on display in the morning, replaced later by two other orangutan groups. The training sessions, which took place in their off-display cages, continued through Sofia’s pregnancy.
On July 27, shortly after they went off display at noon, Sofia went into labor. At 3 p.m., she gave birth to Kutai.
At first, Greenblatt said, Sofia ignored Kutai, dragging her by the still-attached umbilical cord across the cage floor. Once the baby was detached, Sofia simply walked away.
“Then,” Greenblatt said, “the baby cried, and Sofia stopped and turned to look at her. She cupped her hands and put them around the baby, then put it down. For the next hour, she came and looked at the baby several times.”
After two hours, she said, Sofia began to properly carry Kutai, but for the first night and next morning refused to let her breast-feed. The anxious keepers were only going to allow Sofia 48 hours to begin breast-feeding. If she didn’t, they were going to take the baby for bottle-feeding.
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But at noon, July 28, Sofia lay down to rest and the baby naturally found a nipple and began to feed.
“Sofia seemed very pleased and contented,” Greenblatt said. “The next time the baby wanted to feed, Sofia actually helped put her on the nipple.”
With mother and baby properly bonded to each other, father Ben has no parenting duties whatsoever. Nursed and reared by his own mother, he does not seem to mind at all. Sofia was Ben’s first romance, and Greenblatt said he is hopelessly in love with her, a doting, gentle mate.
“He is so happy with her,” she said.
Because they are a proven, breeding couple, Greenblatt said it is likely that Ben and Sofia will be paired for the rest of their lives. If all goes according to nature, they will produce another baby in four or five years.
Only 37,000 orangutans remain in the wild in Borneo, and their forest habitats are disappearing fast. Somewhat difficult to breed in captivity, only 220 Bornean orangutans live in zoos worldwide, 77 in North America.
That is why Kutai’s birth was welcome news in zoos everywhere.
But Greenblatt said Brookfield’s experience with using positive reinforcement training on orangutans and will get at least as much attention from other zoos. It will be copied to make other, hand-reared animals better mothers, she said, but it is a technique that probably can be used to better care for large land mammals.
“We’re already thinking about how we can use the training to watch our animals better medically, teaching them to let us look into their mouths, taking their temperatures and examining their scratches and scrapes. This has been a very fulfilling experience for us.”.