It's closer to true than you think. The demise of tribal traditions. Antelope, elephant, wild pigs, and, most worrisome to ecologists, primates, which breed too slowly to replenish their ranks. In the heart of the African continent, tribes such as the Baka pygmies have been hunting for eons, but their small villages only nibbled at the forest's bounty. Beginning in the 1980s, however, ancestral hunting ranges were overrun by commercial hunters across Africa's equatorial belt.
Poachers can wipe out entire social groups of primates in a burst or two of automatic gunfire.
If the infants are not killed, they are captured for the illegal pet trade or wind up in cramped orphanages, excluded from the wild gene pool. Compensate farmers for damages caused by crop-raiding species. In Yellowstone, we pay the rancher when wolves eat his sheep. If it's OK to do it here, then we've got to have the same attitude toward Africa. The international community has to shoulder most of the costs.