Trade in gorilla meat and an unseemly alliance between loggers and hunters are threatening the future of Africa's Great Apes, writes Eileen Battersby.
Man's inhumanity to man is ongoing and has been for as long as history has been there to record it. Our abuse of animals is not new either and is largely accepted. For profit or sport or both, it extends far beyond hunting animals for food.
The continuing existence of the ape, our closest relative, and one who has often been domesticated in the cause of behavioural experiments, is not as safe as we may have thought. US natural history writer Dale Peterson, who has written extensively on primates and chimpanzees, explodes any remaining complacency about life as lived by Central Africa's Great Apes, a collective term for chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas.
Peterson's new book, Eating Apes, will shock even readers who felt they were well-informed on the plight of many wild animals. Although fierce when provoked, the ape is a relatively passive, family group-oriented creature. This inherent passivity is proving an increasing liability in the face of the expanding West and Central African hardwood logging industry.
The inadvertent knock-on effect of the European and Asian market demand for African hardwood is a meat trade that has gone far beyond local needs. Commercial logging operations have opened up and destroyed much of the apes habitat, leaving them exposed to hunters who have a restaurant market and bizarre souvenir industry to satisfy.
From the 1920s onwards concerned observers began to realise that man was rapidly working his way through the wild animals of the world and, unlike their domestic counterparts, there were no intensive breeding programmes to replace the butchered stock. A wild species reproduces according to instinct, not science, a slow process incapable of countering killing caused by market demand and sport. Killing a nursing mother results in further deaths, as the orphaned young also die.
The ivory trade finally outraged the public and alerted it to the cause of the elephant. The magnificent tiger, now with three of five subspecies already extinct and the survivors facing extinction, has international support.
However, gorilla meat is rich and sought-after. One former hunter quoted in the book claimed to have slaughtered more than 300 gorillas, another could point to a yearly kill rate of 150. Peterson concedes that among animals killed in the wild, apes account for less than 1 per cent, but he fears for the extinction of these slow breeders - a female gorilla might not reproduce until she is 15 and from then on, perhaps only once every five to eight years - as well as for the blood-borne viruses passing between ape and man during the butchering process, much of which is done at the slaughter site.
In particular, Peterson makes a case for the apes based on their unique intelligence and likeness to man. "The act of eating apes is itself distinctively destructive because of who they are. They are our sibling species, who share with us between 96 and 99 per cent of their genetic code. They are special beings who observe the world through eyes and faces like ours, who manipulate the world with hands and bodies like ours, who experience and display emotions entirely recognisable to us, who make and use tools, who live in astonishingly human-like social systems and deal with each other politically, who show clear evidence of awareness and foresight, who are capable of learning symbolic language, and who laugh in situations you and I might consider worthy of amusement."
It is an interesting book, strange, shocking, unsettling and ambivalent. It offers no moral argument, yet generates a moral debate. Should the ape be better protected than other wild animals simply because of a genetic similarity to humans? Peterson's tone, it should be said, is more reflective than campaigning. However, Swiss-born, Kenyan-based photographer/animal rights campaigner Karl Ammann, who provided the photographs and afterword for the book, leaves no doubt as to the obscene cruelty of the trade as conducted in the Congo Basin and Cameroon.
Included are photographs recording a dead gorilla family unit, slumped together on the forest floor with the caption, "Gorillas, because they travel in family groups, can be killed in family groups", and a picture detailing the habit of transporting body parts inside the engine compartment of a logging vehicle. Three dismembered gorilla arms, two still featuring hands, are stacked on a mudguard.
One particularly macabre still-life study shows a gorilla hand on a restaurant table flanked by three beer bottles, while in another photograph a gorilla head shares kitchen table space with a bunch of unripe bananas. A dead baby chimp is photographed being taken from a freezer, another lies in a bloodstained suitcase.
Almost as upsetting and as perverse are the accounts of people "adopting" baby chimps and treating them as children. According to the book, one couple attempted to raise a baby chimp alongside their child. The chimp's physical development progressed far faster than that of the human infant, but the little human began to speak, while the chimp, although capable of understanding about 100 words, never spoke. "Meanwhile the human baby, Donald, started making chimp noises, and the parents, alarmed at this unanticipated reversal, terminated the experiment." Peterson's main thesis is that modern gorilla DNA is 97.7 per cent the same as that of humans, and that the DNA of the modern chimpanzee and bonobo is 98.7 per cent identical.
"Recent advances in Western scientific disciplines tell us that the great apes are far closer to human than anyone had previously imagined and that this genetic closeness has produced a group of animals whose emotional, social, perceptual, and intellectual lives are strikingly reminiscent of our own."
His argument is strong and persuasive, yet it is difficult to avoid the feeling that more emphasis is placed on the ape's similarity to man than on the animal's natural right to humane treatment.
The difficulties Ammann encountered when trying to interest National Geographic in the story are disturbing. Several conservation bodies were reluctant to take it up, although the natural history magazine, BBC Wildlife, did and National Geographic has since referred to the bush-meat story.
It is a book of detail, often disgusting. Why would an Italian logger order 10 gorilla skulls from a souvenir shop? Elsewhere, we learn that gorilla are almost entirely vegetarian, whereas chimpanzees, "like us, are imaginative omnivores who dutifully eat their fruits and vegetables but passionately devour their meat". The meat trade has sinister undertones, and Peterson notes that "the trade in ape flesh is special, and it has to some degree gone underground during the last few years". Even where the ape is protected, there are people who can source the meat. According to one informant: "They know where to find it."
Fetish surrounds the gorilla as it does the tiger. While some natives view such animals as sacred, others exploit them for superstition. One man had a habit of bathing his little daughter in bathwater "supplemented with powdered bones from a gorilla". Peterson leaves the reader with an awareness of the dangerous alliance that has developed between logger and hunters, with the hunters benefiting from the forest-clearing work done by the loggers.
"We can reasonably conclude," he writes, "that the bush-meat business employs thousands of hunters."
One hunter admits that killing a gorilla generates a similar excitement to that of killing a man. "The gorilla dies as easily as a man . . . He falls forward on his face, his long, muscular arms outstretched, and utters with his last breath a hideous death-cry, half roar, half shriek, which, while it announces to the hunter his safety, yet tingles his ears with a dreadful note of human agony. It is this lurking reminiscence of humanity indeed, which makes one of the chief ingredients of the hunter's excitement in his attack of the gorilla."
Apes, it appears, when facing their killers, also beg for their lives. "Hunters have told Karl that chimpanzees, when wounded and cornered and about to meet their death, will turn and beg for their lives. They beg with precisely the sort of expressive postures and gestures (a hunched bow, outstretched arms, pleading facial expression) that hunters see among human beggars in the city."
As the natural world becomes increasingly vulnerable through the destruction of habitat, endangered animals face greater risks. The African Great Ape, for many the engaging character on the other side of the zoo barrier, has now become yet another pathetic casualty to human greed.
Eating Apes by Dale Peterson is published by University of California Press, priced £15.99. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Great Ape Project