Elephant meat is hacked into 2-pound cubes. A logging road goes in, and five years later there isn't a single large animal left in the forests. Thousands of square kilometers have been hunted clean. We're talking about tons and tons of animal meat, including organized shipments that go across the borders of Gabon and Cameroon. Hit especially hard, environmentalists say, is the Congo Basin's rich diversity of primates.
Monkey meat is prized as a status food among urban elites.
A chimpanzee nets almost as much. Experts warn that only about 120,000 common chimpanzees are left in central Africa's rain forests, and thousands are shot every year. Not even the Pygmies go into some parts of the jungle. This is the Africa not of a hundred years ago, but before the presence of human beings. That extraordinary isolation is what ultimately lies on the chopping block of the loggers and poachers, experts say.