As Poachers Purge Jungles, Species Face Extinction

The first wild monkey Anthony Rose ever saw in Cameroon was dead--gutshot and still next to a porcupine and a pair of tiny red antelope. “A poor day’s catch,” his host apologized, gesturing with his gun.

In two weeks of barnstorming rain forest boomtowns in central Africa, Rose, a conservationist from Los Angeles, counted more primates dead than alive.

They were stacked, stiff as cordwood, on the beds of logging trucks bound for distant cities. Sinewy arms and legs were smoking over trail-side fires. Their fresh red meat was piled in open-air market stalls as women listlessly fanned away flies--and questions.

Rare apes and monkeys are among the world’s most stringently protected and intensively studied creatures. Yet they are being hunted into oblivion.

Not by native trackers armed with bows and arrows. Nor by Hemingway caricatures dressed in crisp safari jackets. The culprits are commercial poachers toting automatic weapons.

Scientists fear these gangs will exterminate many of the world’s 618 primate species--including all the great apes--from equatorial jungles in 10 years. In central Africa, maybe five.

They compare the slaughter to that of the American bison in the 19th century.

“Facing that apes are on the menu is hard enough,” said Rose. “Getting them off the menu and finding alternatives for millions of people is enormously difficult.”

Biologists from several environmental groups, including Conservation International, estimate hunters are dragging 1 million metric tons of game from the forests every year, an amount equal to about 4 million cattle.

In the 20th century, chimpanzees are down 95% from an original population of 2 million. Their descent has been especially swift since the 1970s, when Jane Goodall estimated there still were 1 million in 21 countries.

Gorillas probably never were that plentiful, but their ranks have dwindled too. Field counts from Nigeria to Rwanda since 1998 show at least three subspecies number only in the hundreds.

Things are equally grim in Asia, where the orangutan population has been reduced to fewer than 20,000 in Borneo and Sumatra.

To the hunters, they are meat. And money.

To scientists, primates are lifelines to our evolutionary past. They demonstrate many of the same qualities--emotions, tool use, communications, problem solving--that we have combined to create culture.

Biologically, they carry versions of AIDS, ebola virus and other tropical diseases that have infected millions of humans, and they may provide the cures too.

Scattered Efforts Failing

Can you imagine a world where a Jane Goodall could study mankind’s closest relatives only in a zoo’s ersatz rain forest or in a laboratory cage? It’s closer to true than you think.

“Traditional conservation is failing on every front,” said celebrated photographer Karl Ammann, who has been documenting the escalating hunt for a decade, sometimes with concealed cameras.

He berates primate-eaters as “98.5% cannibals”--a reference to the percentage of DNA that humans share with chimpanzees.

“A drastic new approach might very well represent the last chance for most of the primates and other wildlife,” Ammann said.

Conservationists recoil at Ammann’s finger-pointing but concede that their scattered protection efforts, hampered by infighting for donor dollars, are being overwhelmed by larger forces:

Overpopulation. Civil wars. Poverty. The demise of tribal traditions. And a voracious appetite for game, or “bush meat.” Antelope, elephant, wild pigs and, most worrisome to ecologists, primates, which breed too slowly to replenish their ranks.

In the heart of the African continent, tribes like the Baka Pygmies have been hunting for eons, but their small villages only nibbled at the forest’s bounty.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, ancestral hunting ranges were overrun by commercial hunters across Africa’s equatorial belt, including Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and Congo. Increasingly, the native hunters are abandoning their snares to join the lucrative commercial hunt.

Poachers can wipe out entire social groups of primates in a burst or two of automatic gunfire. If the infants are not killed, they are captured for the illegal pet trade or wind up in cramped orphanages, excluded from the wild gene pool.

Westerners admit they were dazed by how swiftly the hunt has spread.

“The crisis literally erupted as we were sitting there studying the species,” said biologist Heather Eves, coordinator of the recently formed Bush Meat Crisis Task Force in Silver Spring, Md. “It was a shocking thing for all of us.”

“What’s been done in the past isn’t going to work,” Eves said. “We don’t have time for each group to try its own project. We need an unprecedented collaborative effort.”

Reforming Hunters

And different methods, too.

At a recent meeting at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, a growing chorus of primate specialists recommended urgent steps: Pay hunters not to pull the trigger. Compensate farmers for damages caused by crop-raiding species.

“We pay fishermen not to overfish the Georges Bank,” said Boston College anthropologist David Wilkie. “In Yellowstone, we pay the rancher when wolves eat his sheep.”

“Compensation is a necessary part of biodiversity conservation,” Wilkie said. “If it’s OK to do it here, then we’ve got to have the same attitude toward Africa. The international community has to shoulder most of the costs.”

A few small projects are setting the example. In eastern Cameroon, hunters shoot as many as 800 lowland gorillas annually. At that rate, the region’s population of 3,000 will be wiped out quickly.

Two years ago, a group called the Bush Meat Project in Los Angeles offered one hunter, Joseph Melloh, $200 per month to lay down his weapons. Melloh, 35, recruited a few others who also are subsidized by Western donors.

The group’s next step: establishing an ecotourism preserve protected by the former hunters. They hope to demonstrate that living primates are worth more money than dead ones.

“It’s a cash economy now, and whoever has cash has the power,” said Rose, a social psychologist who directs the Bush Meat Project. “One hundred bucks can have a big influence.”

So that’s the carrot. What about the stick?

Punishing people is difficult in Africa because central authority frequently is corrupt or weak. At least a dozen countries are beset by war, genocide and famine.

With their economies struggling, the countries’ greatest wealth is locked in their natural resources. The petroleum market collapsed in the 1980s. What’s left are the forests and mines.

European logging consortiums sign 30-year contracts for huge tracts of virgin forest that yield wood veneers for furniture and luxury car interiors.

Rather than import food, the companies encourage hunters to sell bush meat to thousands of loggers living in muddy shantytowns. Sometimes the hunters rent firearms from the police to do the job.

Armies and refugees also have taken up residence in the forest. They rely on bush meat too.

Locals might eat the primates’ hands, feet and entrails. Heads and genitals are sold as fetishes and folk medicines locally and abroad.

The choice cuts are loaded onto trucks, river ferries and trains destined for city markets hundreds of miles away. A chimp might bring $20; a gorilla, $60.

Conservationists are asking lending agencies like the World Bank to attach wildlife protection standards to foreign aid and development packages.

They want to tax ammunition and prohibit the transport of bush meat on logging trucks crisscrossing what had been remote territory. In Congo, the Wildlife Conservation Society has persuaded one large European logger, Congolais Industrielle de Bois, to cooperate.

But enforcement is difficult. Some countries, like Gabon, have no national parks. Even parks created a century ago are, in Ammann’s words, “mere lines on a map.” Park rangers are few, and they rarely have weapons or even uniforms. Ammann and other longtime observers say they know of no primate hunters being prosecuted.

Other countries, like Cameroon, want development aid for village schools and water systems in exchange for conservation guarantees.

In Congress, Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) has introduced legislation that would provide $5 million a year for primate protection. The bill is modeled after successful elephant and rhino measures.

The $5 million would be a down payment. Wilkie estimates that reversing the bush meat trade will cost $35 million annually. That’s equal to the operating budget of a single large national park in the United States, such as Yellowstone.

Environmental groups would like to entice a technology tycoon to underwrite the effort, or perhaps snare admissions paid by America’s 134 million zoo visitors. The Bronx Zoo has raised $1.5 million for its Africa programs with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

“There’s a lot of disposable income in this country, and we need to tap into it,” said Conservation International’s Russell Mittermier.

Price is another way to control the trade and reduce demand. Trouble is, Westerners can’t agree on what bush meat costs or how much to tax it.

For years, affluent Africans in cities have paid $40 for a plate of monkey or elephant as a cultural link to their ancestral villages. Often the meat is heavily smoked, and dishes are cloaked in wine-based or peanut sauces. Rose says in Cameroon he declined a bowl of monkey stew; it smelled like a sour mutton dish that his grandmother used to make.

But in frontier towns, the unadorned meat sells for a fraction of the cost of beef and chicken. It’s protein that poor people can afford.

“We’re not sure what’s driving the trade,” Wilkie said. “If we don’t know that, we’re not going to be sure of the approaches to minimize it.”

And what if they succeed? Conservationists, most of whom are white, wince at charges that they want to cut off food to fast-growing black nations.

“How do you replace a billion-dollar industry?” Eves said. “How do you replace one million metric tons of protein? You could save hundreds of animals in a single area if you could ensure a system of properly feeding the people.”

That’s beyond the expertise of most conservationists. That’s the irony of the bush meat crisis.

To end the hunting and protect primates for future study, the Jane Goodalls might have to be forsaken for new leaders--ranchers, engineers, meatpackers and supermarket executives.

“These aren’t the things we learn in biology or forestry,” Rose said. “Conservation needs a new vision and new players to get new kinds of results.”