And a voracious appetite for game, or bush meat. 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 like the Baka pygmies have been hunting for eons, but their small villages only nibbled at the forest s bounty. Anthony Rose poses with a Cameroon chimp that was among 28 orphaned after their parents were slaughtered during the previous three years. Increasingly, the native hunters are abandoning their snares to join the lucrative commercial hunt.
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. Westerners admit they were dazed by how swiftly the hunt has spread. Md. It was a shocking thing for all of us. What s been done in the past isn t going to work, Eves said. We need an unprecedented collaborative effort.