What kinds of lives are possible for the animal subjects of ‘conservation’ and the humans who care for them? This question is at the heart of Juno Salazar Parreñas’ Decolonizing extinction, which examines the lives of orangutans and their carers at the Lundu Wildlife Center in Sarawak, West Malaysia. In this richly detailed and often poignant ethnography, Salazar Parreñas re-conceives conservation not in terms of stopping extinction, but rather in helping members of endangered species to die well. The book contributes to the growing body of philosophically charged ethnography in the tradition of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and their intellectual protegées. In some senses, it does not stray far from the core issues of compromised care and ethically fraught inter-species relations definitive of this literature. This includes accounts of the use of ‘tough love’ techniques such as rejection and physical harm to protect the ‘wildness’ of orangutans; the commodification of affective encounters with orangutans for mostly white volunteers paying to do hard labour at the Center; or the unequal conditions of gendered, racialised and classed risk experienced by workers.

The book truly sets itself apart in its discussion of sexual violence in conservation contexts. Salazar Parreñas does not shy away from describing the often brutal conditions of ‘forced copulation’ and ‘compulsory hetero-sexuality’ (p. 85) to which female orangutans are subjected at the Center. For example, she describes an incident in which the young female orangutan Ti is locked into a cage with the much larger and stronger mature male, Efran, who drags her around, repeatedly beats her, refuses to let her sleep and strikes her on the head multiple times. She recounts how, a few years earlier, a very young female named Wani was subjected to similar treatment, and died along with her infant just two weeks after the birth. In another case, a young female named Sadamiah was held down and forced to copulate by two subadult males and seriously injured (pp. 88–9, 92). Harms to female orangutans, and the atmosphere of terror and anxiety in which they live, are tolerated by the Center on the basis that it is necessary to breeding, which is its sole measure of success. This central logic of conservation, Salazar Parreñas argues, conflates gendered individuals with entire species and demands that they unequally absorb the costs of guaranteeing future generations. Critiquing claims that such behaviour is ‘natural’, she calls attention to the conditions that brought the orangutans into this setting, including the imperatives of state-supported development that have shrunk the total habitat for 26 animals to just 6.5 square kilometres, when wild orangutans require ranges of about 7 square kilometres each. The lack of space and sexual imperative to breed removes any element of ‘female choice’ that orangutans might enjoy in the wild, including the ability to avoid sexual encounters and mate with the preferred mature male. Despite overcrowding and a high ratio of males interested in sex, male orangutans are not sterilised because global conservation norms have made the neutering of ‘endangered species’ anathema. What's more, in many cases, these acts of copulation are non-reproductive, since one or both of the animals in question is not sexually mature. Instead, sexual violence persists because it is normalised, naturalised and even encouraged in conservation settings.

Salazar Parreñas offers keen insights into how human norms regarding reproduction, rape and rape culture, including the shifting of blame to survivors, shape the lives of orangutans. For instance, she describes an ‘experiment’ run by the British manager of the Center's for-profit volunteer company, in which he laughs as the large male Efran throws rocks at the door of the cage in which two heavily pregnant females, including Ti, sit. When asked what would happen if he gained access to the females, he replies that they would ‘make sweet love’ (p. 102). A visiting zoologist witnessing the event worries for the health of the foetuses, but not the trauma of the females. Hearing an account of a similarly violent encounter while on a tour of the Center, a Malaysian tourist jokes that the females experience violence because they are ‘so beautiful’. Salazar Parreñas does an excellent job of documenting the different and often conflicted attitudes towards forced copulation of the Center's workers, including a male worker critical of the practice who believes the orangutans are ‘forcing themselves to get raped’ by entering the center (p. 92). As Parreñas points out, the use of ‘rape’ to describe primate sexual behaviours is controversial, as it has been used to justify human behaviours, including the fatal 2012 gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, India. Instead of calling for the uncritical application of the term to orangutans, or the criminalisation of the male orangutans (who themselves, are subject to violent care), or their human carers, Parreñas sheds much-needed light on the structural conditions through which this ‘system of sexual violence’ (p. 85) is constructed through conservation practices. The metaphor of the hospice — a place of care at the end of life — introduced in the final chapters of the book aptly describes the context of ethically fraught, sexually charged, likely palliative care in which contemporary conservation places its subjects.

The book does not quite deliver on its promise to offer a vision for ‘decolonizing extinction’. It offers compelling insights into the specific conditions of semi-freedom emerging from Sarawak's colonial history and present, for humans and orangutans alike, including conditions of ‘arrested autonomy’ and forced dependence between orangutans and humans displaced by neo-liberal capitalism and a never-quite-decolonised state. Elaborating several key concepts of the environmental humanities, it calls for practices of experimental co-living, the acceptance of risk without guarantee of reward (including survival for either party) and cultivating attentiveness to other species in the inter-subject context of conservation. While broader political and economic conditions are discussed, including Sarawak's relations with peninsular Malaysia, rampant deforestation for palm oil agriculture and the private–public partnership (the Forest Corporation) that manages wildlife centres, I would have liked to learn more about how these structures might be literally decolonised. What's more, the concept of ‘extinction’ and the global discourses surrounding it are largely taken for granted; indeed, they are described as a ‘natural’ condition of life on earth (p. 10), which seems to contradict the structural-political analysis of the conditions of orangutan decline that follows. However, in shifting attention to the forms of sexual violence, risk and palliative care integral to conservation practices, this book delivers an important and impactful message about the often fear-ridden, painful, unfree and ultimately terminal lives of the animals subjected to conservation regimes.