If the sight of a baby orangutan hanging onto its human carer with all its tiny strength doesn't make your heart burst, then I'm afraid you're an emotionless fiend and I can have nothing more to do with you.

If, on the other hand, you're a sentient being, then like me you'll have been hooked on BBC One's mini-series Orangutan Diary all last week. The show, presented by nature programming stalwart Michaela Strachan and (*collective, guilty sigh*) Steve Leonard, followed the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation in its valiant and important attempts to help orphaned, injured and illegally-owned orangutans. It seems that some of you emotionless fiends are working in the shadier end of the palm oil industry and destroying the habitat of these beautiful and immensely intelligent creatures.

It's that last point, actually, that made the strongest impression on me throughout the week. The orangutans may not be able to do long division (who the hell can, quite frankly), but there's no doubting their emotional intellect. When you stroke a dog, it may wag its tail through sheer instinct, but when one of the workers at the Foundation put her arm around an orangutan, it repaid the favour in kind, because it *got* what was going on. This show displayed clearly that these animals thoroughly understand human behaviour - when the workers were messing around, or trying to teach them something important about life in the wild.

And that's essentially what it is about, in the end. It's all well and good the animals connecting with humans, but really the point of the Foundation is to get the orangutans back in their natural habitat after six years of rehabilitation and training. They have little classes, you see, out in the jungle, and when you've got to a certain stage, like little Lamon finally climbing a tree after staying resolutely at ground level for a good while, you get to graduate to the next class.

This emotional, but never schmaltzy, series was not just great television, but massively important, because if nothing changes, the orangutan could be extinct within the next ten years, and we'll have to do without one our closest relations. [annawaits]