Orphaned orangutan babies learn survival skills at 'Forest School'

KETAPANG, Indonesia, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- An animal rescue group in Indonesia is teaching motherless baby orangutans how to survive in the wild with a "school" designed to help them teach one another.

International Animal Rescue, which shared video of the abandoned and orphaned orangutans on Facebook, said the "Forest School" in Ketapang provides an environment for the baby primates to learn valuable skills they would have otherwise learned from their mothers.

"When the orangutans arrive here we try to give them an environment that is as natural as possible, that is why we created the forest school," project director Karmele Llano Sanchez says in the video.

"What we want is to try to replicate what an orangutan will do in the wild, so this is what they will learn during the process of rehabilitation," she says.

Sanchez says the sanctuary currently houses 102 orangutans that the charity hopes to eventually return to the wild.