We all love the earth, and wouldn't want to do anything to harm it. But what if you found out that by buying some groceries you were killing thousands of animals? Well, the sad truth is that you are. If you ever buy something that includes vegetable oil, that's palm oil. Palm oil is an edible oil found from the African palm fruits. It is used in many everyday ingredients, and because of this, the demand for palm oil has been getting higher and higher. Palm trees are usually found in orangutan habitats, but they don't care about that. They knock down countless trees, and deforested the whole land, making it unliveable for the animals. Palm Oil is destroying the environment and killing animals. In order to get to get the resources they need, farmers must kill orangutans that live in the trees in very brutal ways.
These gentle creatures are either killed in the deforestation process, when they wonder into a palm oil plantation looking for food, or in the illegal pet trade after they've been captured and kept as pets in extremely poor conditions and provided with extremely poor nutrition.
Orangutans are considered as pests by the palm oil industry. In the deforestation process, workers are told that if wildlife gets in the way, they are to do whatever is necessary in order to dispose of them, no matter how inhumane. Often orangutans are run over by logging machinery, beat to death, buried alive or set on fire... all because of palm oil.
Orangutans in palm oil plantations are considered an agricultural pest because they can damage oil palm crops. In order to get rid of them, often a bounty is put on the orangutan's head. If a female orangutan is found carrying a baby, the mother will be murdered and the baby taken and kept as a pet, or sold on the illegal pet trade and in some cases shipped overseas, often within Asia, or countries like America. Together, we can try to put a stop to this and save thousands of innocent animals as well as the environment. My goal is to get local Australian supermarkets to stop stocking food that contains palm oil. I hope we can all work together and put a stop to palm oil!
