Africa's vanishing apes

摘要

A sudden shower pierces Cameroon's rainforest, disrupting the hunters' lunch. Into the embers goes a gorilla's skull, picked clean; a smoked hand is pocketed for later. The rest of the animal, a prime silverback, has already been freighted out of the forest along a logging road through a nearby concession. The partnership between loggers and hunters has turned traditional hunting grounds into killing fields throughout the Congo basin: Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as well as Cameroon. In as little as ten years, conservationists say, the world's second-biggest tropical forest could be emptied of large mammals; and Africa's great apes-gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos-could become extinct. Bushmeat trading is banned in Cameroon, as is hunting in the six-month off-season, or with locally-made guns and cable-snares at any time. Yet up to 90 tonnes of meat arrive at Yaounde's four bushmeat markets each month. Protected species account for only about 5% of the total but are highly-prized, with elephant and gorilla fetching twice the price of pork or beef.