BushMeat.net A blog about the preservation of gorillas, chimpanzees and more
Title
Bushmeat Project; Save the Great Apes; Chimps,Gorillas, Bonobos, Orangs
Description
Great apes -- gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos -- are being hunted to extinction for commercial bushmeat in the equatorial forests of west and central Africa. A ragged far flung army of a few thousand commercial bushmeat hunters supported by the timber industry infrastructure will illegally shoot and butcher more than two billion dollars worth of wildlife this year, including as many as 8,000 endangered great apes. People pay a premium to eat more great apes each year than are now kept in all the zoos and laboratories of the world. If the slaughter continues at its current pace, the remaining wild apes in Africa will be gone within the next fifteen to fifty years. With them will vanish most of the equatorial rain forest, and the cultures of indigenous people who have lived there for millennia.
It is time that those of us who care about the survival and well-being of the apes, and all life in Africa, confront this crisis. Since our first reports to the international conservation community in 1996 the Bushmeat Project has been urging conservation donors to support programs aimed at helping the African people protect the apes and other endangered animals. The largest wildlife and animal welfare organizations in North America joined us in 1999 in agreement that the Bushmeat Crisis is a top priority concern. It is time to act.
If we are to stop the slaughter of protected and endangered species we must do so with and through the people who are now involved in the trade, from lorry driver to logging executive, hunter to housewife, gendarme to gentry. Conservation must pursue the biosynergy of humanity and nature in order to find alternative ways to satisfy the human needs that drive the destructive commercial trade in wildlife bushmeat.
