In West Africa, people depend on bushmeat for survival. We're talking about wild animals hunted and killed for human consumption. Professional hunters armed with snares and rifles fan out in the heavily vegetated jungle in places like the Congo and the Cameroon to collect every kind of warm blooded vertebrate for sale in the 'meat' sections of local village markets. In West Africa, villages don't have supermarkets with the latest packaged edibles. They don't have McNuggets or frozen pizza they can heat up in the oven. They don't have ovens either. Even if they did, the people have no money to buy food. The average person survives on less than two dollars a day in West Africa. They get along the traditional way, subsisting on what nature provides, plants like cassava root and bushmeat.
Subsistence living has worked in West Africa for tens of thousands of years of human evolution. It does not work anymore. There quite simply are too many people trying to survive on nature's rapidly dwindling reserves.
As much as twenty percent of the bushmeat trade is in wild primates. We're talking gorillas, chimps, colobus, and various other kinds of monkeys. These creatures have hands like ours, and large brains in relation to body size. The evidence shows they are
sentient beings, able to experience pleasure and pain. They can't speak like humans, but the closest primate relatives to humans - the great apes like gorillas and chimps - can be trained to communicate to a remarkable degree using sign language.
Koko the gorilla is wonderful testament to that fact. She understands more than a thousand hand signs and more than two thousand spoken words.
In West Africa, we humans are eating our closest relatives; consuming them as food. There is little or no malevolence involved. It's just a fact. It's all they have ever known in West Africa, and there is no alternative. Corporations that provide an abundance of food for developed nations have little presence in West Africa, mostly because there is no money in it.
Eating our closest relatives is not new to humans. A hundred thousand years ago, 'Australopithicus' - a close human relative that walked erect, but had a smaller brain - shared the landscape with humans. Guess who hunted the lesser species and ate them. If you haven't seen the 1981 movie,
Quest for Fire, check it out. See who's tied up, hanging from a tree limb, waiting to be put on the dinner menu.
In 2012, the bushmeat trade in West Africa is an abhorent fact of life.
Eating off the land is the way it's always been in Africa. In fact, before developed nations were developed, that's how it was in those places as well. Humans were hunter/gatherers before they became farmers. In much of Africa, it's still that way. Estimates suggest up to 90% of animal protein consumed by people living in the Congo Basin comes from bushmeat. Only now, the human population is exploding. Humans are taking more and more of the land, the water, and other resources for themselves. The massive wild animal slaughter that is taking place is devastating.
It's easy to apply lazy logic and place all the blame on the Africans for the demise of their wildlife. That would be very wrong.
Rapacious multi-national corporations covet the still largely untapped natural resources in Africa. In the Congo, Cameroon, and other West African nations, we're talking timber and a whole range of valuable rare earth minerals that have already been substantially exploited in other parts of the world. Killing off the wildlife that currently occupy the lands these outside forces covet is the first step to opening up rampant exploitation.
It's hard to see much hope for the wild creatures of West Africa. There are already parts of the landscape in the Congo basin that have largely been stripped of their wildlife.
The bushmeat trade is heartbreaking. I so wish there was a way to stop it, or at least reduce it to a level that nature can manage.
Much of the world's human population growth is taking place in Africa. That's because we gave them modern medicine but have not helped them manage their fertility. The Democratic Republic of the Congo currrently has a human population of about 75 million. That is expected to mushroom to 180 million by 2050. With all those people dependent on bushmeat, what chance do the wild animals have? It pains me in the deepest way to think that gorillas, chimpanzees, other primate species - in fact all the wildlife - in Africa are doomed to extinction, to a great degree from being eaten by humans.
Since the earliest days of colonialism, Europeans have manipulated the African continent. One thing we haven't done is provide access to family planning. By focusing mostly on what we can take from Africa rather than what we could do for it, we are complicit in its demise. Africa's expanding human populations will eat their wildlife legacy to survive, and when that legacy is gone, and there is nothing left to eat, the people will starve. As devastasting as it is to consider, the entire African continent is caught up in a death spiral... not just the animals, but for the humans who live there as well.
Here is a link to a study about the impact of the bustmeat trade...
http://www.culturallandscapes.ca/blahdocs/uploads/2003bushmeat_and_food_security_1758.pdf
Here is a link to the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force
http://www.bushmeat.org/
