Gorilla Warfare

..nternational
BY SHARON BEGLEY
N THE LUSH PLAINS OF CONGO'S VIRUNGA NATIONAL PARK LAST WEEK,
the convoy ofporters rounded the final hill and trooped into camp.
Theygently set down the wooden frame they had carried for miles,
and with itthe very symbol oftheMricanjungle: a 600-pound silverback
mountain gorilla. A leader ofa troop often visited by
tourists, his arms and legs were lashed to the wood, his head hanging low and
spots ofblood speckling his fur. The barefoot porters, shirts torn and pants
caked with dustfrom their trek, lay him beside three smaller gorillas, all females,
who had also been killed, then silently formed a semicircle around the
bodies. As the stench ofdeath wafted across the camp in the waning afternoon
light, a parkwarden stepped forward. "What man would do this?" he thundered.
He answered himself: "Not even a beastwould do this:'
Park rangers don't know who killed the four mountain gorillas
found shot to death in Virunga, but it was the seventh killing of
the critically endangered primates in two months. Authorities
doubt the killers are poachers, since the gorillas' bodies were left
behind and an infant-who could bring thousands ofdollars from
a collector-was found clinging to its dead mother in one ofthe
earlier murders. The brutality and senselessness ofthe crime had
conservation experts concerned that the most dangerous animal
in the world had found yet another excuse to slaughter the creatures
with whom we share the planet. "This area mustbe immediately
secured:' said Deo Kujirakwinja of the Wildlife Conservation
Society's Congo Program, "or we stand to lose an entire
population ofthese endangered animals."
Back when the Amazon was aflame and the forests ofSoutheast
Asia were being systematically clear-cut, biologists were
clear about what posed the greatest threat to the world's wildlife,
and it wasn't men with guns. For decades, the chief threat was
habitat destruction. Whether it was from impoverished locals
burning a forest to raise cattle or a multinational denuding a
tree-covered Malaysian hillside, wildlife was dying because
species were being driven from their homes. Yes, poachers
killed tigers and other trophy animals-as they had since
before Theodore Roosevelt-and subsistence hunters
took monkeys for bushmeat to put on their tables, butthey
were not a primary danger.
That has changed. "Hunting, especially in Central and West
Africa, is much more serious than we imagined:' says Russell Mitte~eier,
president of Conservation International. "It's huge:'
with the result that hunting now constitutes the pre-eminent
threat to some species. That threat has been escalating over the
past decade largely because the opening offorests to logging and
mining means that roads connect once impenetrable places to
towns. "It's easier to get to where the wildlife is and then to have
access to markets:' says conservation biologist Elizabeth Bennett
ofthe Wll.dlife Conservation Society. Economic forces are also at
play. Thanks to globalization, meat, fur, skins and other animal
parts "are sold on an increasingly massive scale across the world:'
she says. Smoked monkey carcasses travel from Ghana to New
York and London, while gourmets in Hanoi and Guangzhou feast
on turtles and pangolins (scaly anteaters) from Indonesia. There
is a thriving market for bushmeat among immigrants in Paris,
New York, Montreal, Chicago and other points in the African di-
22 NEWSWEEK AUGUST 6, 2007