When staff at Dublin zoo discovered an orangutan named Mujur was pregnant they decided to stage maternal workshops.
The 19-year-old female had not sufficiently bonded with either of her previous infants, who died in 2019 and 2022, so when she became pregnant earlier this year the zoo enlisted breastfeeding human mothers to try to show her how it was done.
Lizzie Reeves, a midwife and lactation specialist who is part of the breastfeeding team at the National maternity hospital in Ireland’s capital, organised a roster of 30 mothers to take turns teaching the ape, whose species is critically endangered.
The orangutan house was closed off while the women breastfed their own infants. “Mujur was extremely interested in watching the women feed their babies through the glass, even mirroring some of their actions,” the zoo said in a statement on Monday.
“A lot of women said: ‘Look, an orangutan doesn’t wear a T-shirt.’ So they whipped off their T-shirts and their bras so Mujur could literally see everything,” Reeves told the Irish Times.
Nora Murphy, a first-time mother from Rathfarnham in Dublin, thought it would be a great story to eventually tell her now 10-month-old daughter, Elodi. “You are going from being a mother yourself to trying to help a mother to be. You would be talking to her saying: ‘Look this is what you are meant to do,’” she said.
Mujur was shown videos of other orangutans feeding their babies as part of the tuition. She gave birth on 31 July to a healthy male and showed “good maternal care”, suggesting the teaching had an effect, but did not hold the infant in quite the correct place for feeding, the zoo said.
The institution would normally have let nature take its course but given the infant’s genetic profile – his father was Sibu, a patriarch who died in February – it intervened. “The difficult decision was made to separate the infant from Mujur and commence bottle feeding him.”
The infant will be transferred in several weeks to Monkey World, a 65-acre centre in Dorset, England, with experience in raising orangutans. “The whole team has already fallen hopelessly in love with him, and it will be difficult to say goodbye, however we are confident that he is being sent to the best possible place for him to continue to develop and thrive,” said the zoo.
