Poachers Biggest Threat To Chimps, Goodall Reports

Chimpanzees already endangered by human-carried diseases and the loss of their habitat now face an even greater threat - poachers who have traded spears for automatic rifles.

Jane Goodall, the British scientist renowned for her study of chimpanzees, said logging roads winding deep into African forests have left chimpanzees vulnerable to the poachers, who find ready markets for the meat at home but also as far away as Europe.

While in the past the hunters relied on nets, spears and other traditional weapons, they now are using shotguns and automatic rifles, enabling them to kill more quickly, she told a news conference Wednesday.

“I think the bush meat trade is probably the greatest danger in many central and west African countries today,” Goodall said. “What was subsistence hunting is now business.”

Together with the destruction of forests for firewood and lumber, the hunting of chimpanzees has reduced their population to 250,000 in 21 African countries from 2 million at the turn of the century, Goodall said.

Although chimpanzees and gorillas are protected species in the countries where they are hunted, the laws are poorly enforced and demand for the meat is wide.

Chimpanzee and gorilla are on menus in cities from Cameroon to Congo, and as far away as Paris and Brussels, according the World Wide Fund for Nature. The meat is served dried, smoked and as steak or stew.

Goodall, who has studied Tanzania’s chimpanzees for 38 years, said she is a vegetarian because “I don’t want to eat anything that represents fear, pain and death.”

Lumber companies owned by Germans, Britons, Japanese and Americans are punching great networks of roads into forests, she said. Human traffic on the roads expose chimps and gorillas to deadly diseases, including measles and polio.

Employees of timber companies often rely on bush meat as a source of protein, and logging trucks are known to ferry large quantities of bush meat out to cities and towns.

A recent survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Republic of Congo found meat from 19 gorillas in a market in northern Ouesso over 11 weeks. A similar study by the International Primate Protection League estimated 400 to 600 gorillas are killed each year in the northern Republic of Congo.

Chimps also are maimed by hunters. In three separate study areas in the Ivory Coast and Uganda, up to 50 percent of adults chimps had lost a hand or a foot to snares, Goodall said.