Contemporary certified zoos often declare that wildlife extraction is no longer part of their trade. Yet the history of one orangutan dynasty reveals how animal cultural knowledge continues to erode as a lingering consequence of extraction—suggesting that "taking" represents a repetitive action rather than a past act. Studbook data, medical records, oral histories, and archival materials help reconstruct a familial biography illuminating the evolution of primate care practices. This paper shows how, from the forcible removal of forebears in Sumatra during the 1960s to the euthanasia of the youngest offspring in Zurich in 2023, keepers continuously deliberated over orangutans' existing knowledge about nursing their babies and grappled with what parental knowledge vanished in the transition to captivity. The issue of parental care reveals how zookeepers and institutional veterinarians speculated about orangutans' loss of maternal know-how. The question of parenthood—as emotion, instinct, and practice—marks moments of tension and convergence between the experiences and knowledge constituting care by both human keepers and captive orangutans. Some interventions in orangutan child-rearing manifested as institutional violence and disregard for mothers' learned knowledge, while other cases demonstrated profound zookeeper devotion and empathy.