Confidence in what you and I can achieve is our salvation.
Yesterday, I wrote about just a few of the things going on in our world that have the power to destroy us. Destroy us in the sense of making us feel powerless, irrelevant and insignificant. Trust me, there were plenty more examples that I could have mentioned.
But so what!
The vast majority of the humans on this planet have control over what they think. Untold numbers of those self-same people have control over what they do with their lives.
Take Dr Peter Pratje. I suspect that you, as with me, hadn’t heard of Dr Pratje before. But he is a Project leader with the Frankfurt Zoological Society and he holds an MSc in Biology and a PhD in Conservation biology. This may be learned not from the website of that Frankfurt Society but from the website of the Orangutan project. Bet you hadn’t heard of that project either. The Orangutan Project (TOP) is described:
The Orangutan Project (TOP) is the world’s foremost not-for-profit organisation, supporting orangutan conservation, rainforest protection, local community partnerships and the rehabilitation and reintroduction of displaced orangutans back to the wild, in order to save the two orangutan species from extinction.
Back to the good Doctor. This is what he says, “What we do for orangutans, we do for ourselves.”
Now settle down for a tad less than twelve minutes and see the power of self, see what we can do for ourselves.
Published on Dec 4, 2013
Peter Pratje, of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, introduces us to our orangutan family and reveals how we, as individuals, can help prevent their imminent extinction.
The eleven minutes long video accompanies Peter Pratje and his team working with young orangutans at the jungle school. The apes have been confiscated after illegally being held as pets. In daily training sessions they now learn the survival skills they need for a life of freedom – how to climb trees, build nests, find food and generally behave like wild orangutans. The project aim is to re-introduce the great apes into the Bukit Tigapuluh national park in central Sumatra.
Taking matters into their own hands, the young orangutans were most supportive – snatching the small and robust cameras and filming themselves climbing up and down trees.
Music Courtesy of ExtremeMusic, http://extrememusic.com
Special Thanks: Frankfurt Zoological Society (http://www.zgf.de)
Learning from Dogs 
People in the most advanced nations could do more for wildlife by insisting that advanced countries being used as shelters… Not just in zoos, but through rewilding. There use to be bears, wolves, lions and leopards (or jaguars) all over Europe and North America.
Meanwhile refusing to eat anything with palm oil (as I do) with help your health, and Orangutans…
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/rewilding-us/
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Patrice, I know you will be comfortable with my plan to republish that post you linked to in full tomorrow on Learning from Dogs.
Whoops! Realised after writing the above line that it was republished back on the 17th October under the title Let there be lions.
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Yes, it was, thanks Paul. I have others that may be interesting such as No Ideology But Greed (OK, maybe too much about France, but funny France is considered to be so left wing…)
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These are beautiful creatures Paul, sometimes I think do gooders do more for our animal welfare than we do for human welfare..And so many of our wonderful wild life is at risk from the misuse of power
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Amen to that! Jeannie would have a baby orang-utan in a heartbeat!
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