Gorilla Warfare

aspora, with an estimated 13,000 pounds ofbushmeat-much of
it primates-arriving every month in seven European and North
American cities alone. "Hunting and trade have already resulted
in widespread local extinctions in Asia and West Africa;' says
Bennett. "Theworld's wild places are falling silent:'
When a company wins a logging or mining concession, it immediately
builds roads wide enough for massive trucks where the
principal access routes had been dirt paths no wider than a jaguar.
"Almost no tropical forests remain across Africa and Asia which
are not penetrated by logging or other roads;' says Bennett.
Hunters and weapons follow, she notes, "and wildlife flows cheaply
and rapidly down to distant towns where it is either sold directly
or links in to global markets." How quickly can opening a forest
ravage the resident wildlife? Three weeks after a logging company
opened up one Congo forest, the density ofanimals fell more than
25 percent; a year after a logging road went into forest areas in
Sarawak, Malaysia, in 2001, not a single large mammal remained.
A big reason why hunting used to pale next to habitat destruction
is that as recently as the 1990s animals were killed mostly for
subsistence, with locals taking orily what they needed to live.
Governments and conservation groups helped reduce even that
through innovative programs giving locals an economic stake in
the preservation of forests and the survival of wildlife. In the
mountains ofRwanda, for instance, tourists pay $500 to spend
an hour with the majestic mountain gorillas, bolstering the economy
ofthe surrounding region. But recent years have brought a
more dangerous kind of hunter, and not only because they use
AK-47s and even land mines to hunt.
The problem now is that hunting, even ofsupposedly protected
animals, is a global, multimillion-dollar business. Eating
bushmeat "is now a status symbol;' says Thomas Brooks ofConservation
International. "It's not a subsistence issue. It's not a
poverty issue. It's considered supersexy to eat bushmeat." Exact
figures are hard to come by, but what conservation groups know
about is sobering. Every year a single province in Laos exports
$3.6 million worth of wildlife, including pangolins, cats, bears
and primates. In Sumatra, about 51 tigers were killed each year
between 1998 and 2002; there are currently an estimated 350
tigers left on the island (down from 1,000 or so in the 1980s) and
fewer than 5,000 in the world.
Ifa wild population is large enough, it can withstand hunting.
Butfor many species that "if" has not existed for decades. As a result,
hunting in Kilum-Ijim, Cameroon, has pushed local elephants,
buffalo, bushbuck, chimpanzees, leopards and lions to
the brink of extinction. The common hippopotamus, which in
1996 was classified as of "least concern" because its numbers
seemed to be healthy, is now "vulnerable": over the past 10 years
its numbers have fallen as much as 20 percent, largely because the
hippos are illegally hunted for meat and ivory. Pygmy hippos,
classified as "vulnerable" in 2000, by lastyear had become endangered,
at risk of going extinct. Logging has allowed bushmeat
hunters to reach the West African forests where the hippos live;
fewer than 3,000 remain.
Setting aside parks and other conservation areas is only as
good as local enforcement. "Halfofthe major protected areas in
Southeast Asia have lost at least one species of large mammal
due to hunting, and most have lost many more;' says Bennett.
In Thailand's Doi Inthanon and Doi Suthep National Parks, for
instance, elephants, tigers and wild cattle have been hunted
into oblivion, as has been every primate and hornbill in
Sarawak's Kubah National Park. The world-famous Project
Tiger site in India's Sariska National Park has no tigers, biologists
announced in 2005. Governments cannot afford to pay as
many rangers as are needed to patrol huge regions, and corruption
is rife. The result is "empty-forest syndrome": majestic
landscapes where flora and small fauna thrive, butwhere larger
wildlife has been hunted out.
Which is not to say the situation is hopeless. With governments
and conservationists recognizing the extinction threat
posed by logging and mining, they are taking steps to ensure that
animals do not come out along with the wood and minerals. In
one collaboration, the government ofCongo and the WCS work
with a Swiss company, Congolaise Industrielle des
Bois-which has a logging concession near Nouabale­
Ndoki National Park-to ensure that employees and
their families hunt only for their own food needs; the
company also makes sure that bushmeat does not get
stowed away on logging trucks as illegal hunters try to take
their haul to market. Despite the logging, gorillas, chimps,
forest elephants and bongos are thriving in the park.
Anyone who thrills at the sight ofman'S distant cousins
staring silently through the bush can only hope thatthe executions
ofVirunga's gorillas is an aberration. At the end of the
week, UNESCO announced that it was sending a team to investigate
the slaughter.
With SCOTT JOHNSON in Virunga Park and JULIE SCElFO in New York
AUGUST 6. 2007 NEWSWEEK 23