When staff at Dublin Zoo discovered that an orangutan named Mujur was pregnant, they decided to offer workshops for mothers.

The 19-year-old female had not formed a sufficient bond with her previous cubs, who died in 2019 and 2022. So when she became pregnant earlier this year, the zoo hired nursing human mothers to show her how it’s done.

Lizzie Reeves, a midwife and lactation consultant who is part of the breastfeeding team at the National Maternity Hospital in Ireland’s capital, has put together a squad of 30 mothers who take turns teaching the monkey, whose species is threatened with extinction.

The orangutan house was cordoned off while the women breastfed their own babies. “Mujur was extremely interested in watching the women feeding their babies through the glass and even imitated some of their actions,” the zoo said in a statement on Monday.

“Many women said, ‘Look, an orangutan doesn’t wear a T-shirt.’ So they took off their T-shirts and bras so Mujur could literally see everything,” Reeves told the Irish Times.

Nora Murphy, a young mother from Rathfarnham in Dublin, thought it would be a great story to tell her daughter Elodi, now 10 months old. “You’re no longer a mother yourself, you’re trying to help a mother-to-be. You’d talk to her and say, ‘Look, this is what you’re supposed to do,'” she said.

Mujur was shown videos of other orangutans feeding their babies as part of the class. She gave birth to a healthy male on July 31 and showed “good maternal care,” suggesting the classes were effective but the cub was not being kept in the right place for feeding, the zoo said.

Normally, the institution would have let nature take its course, but given the infant’s genetic profile – his father was Sibu, a patriarch who died in February – it intervened. “The difficult decision was made to separate the infant from Mujur and bottle feed him.”

The baby will be transferred in a few weeks to Monkey World, a 65-acre center in Dorset, England, that has experience in raising orangutans. “The whole team has already fallen hopelessly in love with him and it will be hard to say goodbye, but we are confident he will be sent to the best possible place so he can continue to develop and thrive,” the zoo said.