The most unforgettable article I've discovered at Newsvine

Photo from article source at http://www.viceland.com

I am all gratitude for discovering Newsvine and being a part of it. This is such an amazing information find--the viners here are so motivated that the best of news and feature articles from practically all fields and from many parts of the world are seeded here, not to mention the generally interesting articles written by the members themselves. During my approximately three months of Newsvine discovery, there are simply a lot of stimulating and remarkable readings. The year-ender assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto is truly attention-grabbing for appalling reasons, but the one most unforgettable is "An orangutan has been rescued from a "prostitute village"'. For the sheer combination of prostitution and bestiality, the article has struck a sensitive, humane chord in me.

I discovered the article as I was about to seed an item on orangutans, during my Newsvine research as a precaution not to seed a duplicate. It is my SOP to search for keyword(s), looking both in Tags and in Full text, and as the results came out, the article seeded by Chello beckoned a click. The story is about an orangutan in Borneo named Pony, who was used by village men as a 'prostitute'. The summary goes: "You could choose a human if you preferred, but it was a novelty for many of the men to have sex with an orangutan." Pony was about 6 or 7 years old and had been held captive for a long time. Used as a sex slave, "If a man walked near her, she would turn herself around, present herself, and start gyrating and going through the motions."

Reading through gave me tears and brought me into a profound state of contemplation I have not been in years. I am no ignoramus into the cruelty of both nature and humans; moreover, as a student of history, few things can really shock me anymore. I am also pretty aware of the scientific necessity of guinea pig experiments, but Pony's story smacks of the level of inhumanity man can go down to. Bestiality, though relatively rare, is perhaps as old as prostitution, and happens in many parts of the globe, including in the West among shepherds, etc. However, doing it with an evolutionary cousin, a primate, under sex-slave circumstances is horribly unthinkable.

Then again, the story reveals the complex, if not unfathomable, irony of the human mind and psyche. It had to take "35 policemen armed with AK-47s" to rescue Pony because the madam who kept her, along with villagers, refused to give up the 'baby' "everyone loved."

In about 48 hours, the whole world will welcome the New Year with a bang. I will then read about the globe (and the discovered parts of the Universe) in 2008 mainly through the capturing lens of Newsvine. More information to gobble up and digest, more insights, perhaps more arguments to put forward, more introspections and hopefully, lessons to learn from.

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