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Apps for Apes to supply Toronto Zoo’s orangutans with iPads

The Toronto Zoo is at "the top of the list" to receive a donated iPad from Orangutan Outreach's Apps for Apes program.

The program began at the Milwaukeee Zoo. Because of the success of its three iPad-using apes, Apps for Apes is now extending to other zoos.

The program is now just waiting on iPad donations for Toronto.

In Milwaukee, the critically endangered animals play with a painting app on the iPad held up by a zookeeper on the other side of a mesh screen. (They can't handle the iPads on their own. The risk of the animals dismantling and consuming the electronic device is too high.) The painting program is designed to stimulate the animals, as they get bored in captivity.

Watch the orangutans in Milwaukee play with iPads below.

"Orangutans like to paint and they're capable of using this digital device," Founder and director Richard Zimmerman told The Toronto Star, adding another bonus to digital art: "there's no paint to eat."

Zimmerman hopes that video-chat apps will allows orangutans from different zoos to get to know one another, as "they show recognition the same as we do," with their eyes lighting up when shown images of family members transferred to another zoo.

Of course, there's also the possibility of ape-friendly online dating:

"Orangutans have to move zoos for mating," York University's Suzanne MacDonald, who studies animal behaviour and cognition, told Macleans. "It would be really cool if they could meet over the Internet first and see if they got along, or if they're terrified of each other."