Some breast-feeding Irish moms rushed to help a pregnant orangutan who didn’t know how to feed her babies — personally demonstrating their technique to her through glass in an incredibly heartwarming effort.
The ape-to-human teaching moment took place over the past few months at the Dublin Zoo, the zoo said.
The touching move occurred before 19-year-old zoo orangutan Mujur delivered her healthy boy July 31, officials said.
Mujur had given birth in 2019 and 2022, but both babies ultimately died when she didn’t “exhibit the necessary maternal qualities’’ — so something had to be tried differently this time around, the zoo said.
Ahead of the 2024 birth, the zoo sent out an SOS to local moms in the hopes they could show Mujur how to breast-feed.
Thirty woman stepped forward and then took turns breast-feeding their infants in front of Mujur, with a glass wall separating them.
About four women would take turns sitting in front of Mujur daily, the zoo said.
“You find yourself rooting for [Mujur],’’ said volunteer Nora Murphy to the Irish Times, adding she thought it would be a great story to tell her now-10-month-old daughter when she grows up.
“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,’ ” Murphy said.
“She would stare at you really looking at what you were doing. She was hand-expressing as time went on, which was magic.”
Midwife and lactation specialist Lizzie Reeves marveled at the volunteers’ dedication.
“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 said.
But sadly, the mothers’ valiant efforts’ fell short.
While Mujur showed some good maternal care toward her newborn after birth, she struggled putting him in the right position to feed, zoo officials said.
The zoo said it made the “difficult decision” to separate the ape baby from mother so that workers could bottle feed him for a few weeks before he is moved to a specialist institution in the UK that has experience hand-raising orangutans.
“While we had been hopeful for a better outcome where Mujur could care for the infant effectively, we had also been planning for this scenario,” the zoo said.
The baby’s father, Sibu, died in February.
The baby ape’s birth was highly significant because orangutans are a critically endangered species and females only give birth every three to five years to an infant at a time.
