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LillyNomad
Former Member
Registered: Dec 2000
Posts: 584
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Africa's humanlike apes -gorillas and chimpanzees-are rapidly being wiped out. Much as that distresses conservationists, the need to stop the hunting has taken on greater urgency since scientists announced in early 1999 that HIV-1, the most common AIDS virus, came from a subspecies of the African chimpanzee. They believe the virus probably passed into humans when hunters nicked themselves butchering their kill or ate raw meat. Since the chimps don't seem to get sick from the virus, they may be the key to a cure. It's crucial that they be kept alive and studied.
Too many kills or bush kills are going on. Environmentalist's once thought most apes were killed in attempts to steal their babies or for illegal pet trade. Now the new fad is for "bush meat" on the tables of the elite in Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, the Central African Republic and other countries.
Hunting endangered species is illegal, or course, but the law is rarely enforced. The bush-meat market is is a fast-paced growing commodity.
The mmiddle class people don't want beef or chicken anymore. They call it white man's meat. You can order gorilla for Christmas the same way you would order a goose or turkey.
Changing Africans' feelings about eating apes will be hard, but it can be done. The Japanese like to eat whales, but whales were becoming endangered so Japanese behaviour is changing. And conserving chimpanzees might turn out to be even more important than conserving whales or elephants or rhinos.
There is no guarantee that simian studies will reveal a cure or a vaccine for AIDS. But the extinction of vital chimpanzee species surely guarantees that they won't.
LillyNomad
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3rd February 2001 23:50
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LillyNomad
Former Member
Registered: Dec 2000
Posts: 584
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The explosion in bush-meat hunting is being propelled by two converging forces: logging and corruption. As coffee and cocoa prices have fallen, timber exports have soared. Loggers have extended a spiderweb of roads into the rain forest to reach the 800-year-old hardwoods, and hunters are moving down them, snaring or shooting anything moves.
Rather than pay to ship beef or pork to the jungle dormitory towns where their workers live, some logging companies encourage hunting. The hundreds of log trucks headed for the coast have become a bush-meat caravan. Bleeding bags of meat can be spotted behind the cabs; the drivers get a cut of the proceeds.
The political way will to stop the hunting does not exist. Hunters rent their guns from army and police officers. There are roadblocks everywhere where police could seize the meat, but they let anyone through for a two-dollar bribe; government officials serve bush meat at banquets.
LillyNomad
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3rd February 2001 23:55
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Rooivalk
Member
Registered: Jul 2001
Posts: 31
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cannibals are hard too stop! ..........
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29th July 2001 02:39
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