At any given moment, war in one form or another is being waged somewhere. For one reason or another, somebody doesn't like somebody else or somebody wants something that somebody else has. As a result, people die. Lots of people. In some cases, the United Nations sends in a peacekeeping force. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Even if it works, many people die before it works. In other cases, most of them, there is no U.N. intervention.
In West and Central Africa, another kind of war is being waged in which death is the inevitable outcome. It isn't humans who are being killed, however, it is their closest relatives — gorillas and chimpanzees. They are being exterminated at an alarming because their forest habitat is being commercially logged. But it isn't logging that is killing them directly. They are being slaughtered for meat. Bushmeat.
The bushmeat story is not new, according to Swiss photographer Karl Ammann, who has been studying this story since the late 1980s. It is, he says, "one of the biggest, if not the biggest, primate conservation issue facing Africa today," in an article printed in the Gorilla Foundation newsletter.
According to the article, Ammann has interviewed 200 "commercial and subsistence hunters, and documented an equal number of orphan ape scenarios." This anecdotal evidence along with research data on bushmeat consumed, he says, provides "overwhelming evidence" of the size of the bushmeat trade and the threat it poses to conservation. The Feb. 1997 issue of Natural History carries a more extensive story — with photographs.
Hunters get $40 for a smoked gorilla, $20 for a chimp and $5 for a monkey, Ammann says. One commercial hunter he interviewed several times said he killed about 50 great apes annually. Those orphans that don't end up as food, he says, may become pets doomed to die of "malnutrition, disease, or depression." he says, "Chimpanzees have the will to live if they're separated from their family, but gorillas fall into a depressive state and just give up on life." Worldwatch Institute confirmed the plight of the chimpanzee, "mankind's closest evolutionary relative," in a report issued in August. "Almost half of the 235 primates are threatened with extinction. . .," Worldwatch said.
Apes are not the only wildlife sought for food, Ammann says. "Every creature that walks, crawls, or flies" is being shot or snared, he says. Fish eagles, bats, palm, grubs, turtles, crocodiles, monitor lizards, African gray parrots and everything else is fair game. Population growth, economics and culture create the demand for bushmeat, but it is the extensive road network built by loggers that makes it possible for hunters to get to once inaccessible areas. Loggers and villagers eat some of the meat locally; logging trucks haul the rest of it out of the forest for urban consumers. Ammann says that an international public outcry is needed to save the great apes. You can be sure that a U.N. force won't be sent in.
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