The Great Orangutan Project Is Feeling Scent-imental After Providing New Enrichment Activity!

Posted by Ellie Hutchin on 20th Jun 2017

As many of you are probably aware, enrichment activities for animals in rehabilitation are key for their progress in eventually being able to be returned to their natural habitat. Our most recent update from The Great Orangutan Project informed us that those great apes along with their other furry friends at the site have relished in their new enrichment activity!

Healing Animals Organisation (a non-profit company based in the UK) kindly provided the project with some essential oils, which have been used for scent enrichment. Scent enrichment is a great way to stimulate natural behaviours within the animals, helping them to become familiarised with scents that they may discover in the wild. Additionally, this educational activity encourages the animals to establish whether they can eat the sources of these exciting aromas in the wild.

This is the rehabilitation area at the project site.

The wildlife at the project site engaged fantastically with the enrichment! All the orangutans immersed themselves in the activity and became quite playful, and two of the bears rolled around in them for almost two hours! The most fascinating of all was how the binturongs reacted; for those of you that are unfamiliar with this creature, they are furry friends that somewhat resemble racoons. These little fellows had a whale of a time as one of them was even still playing with his enrichment ball more than 24 hours after they were given it!

Bronwynn, our project coordinator says; “We place a huge importance on enrichment of our sanctuary animals and it is always something volunteers will be involved with making and watching the animals enjoy. There’s nothing more rewarding than discovering some enrichment that lights up the day of a sanctuary animal.”

If you would like to help with the enrichment at the project site, we have some last-minute availability for The Great Orangutan Project this summer, so if you would like to know some more information then please view the project in our project page.

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