Congo's "Hippies of the Forest" Apes Dying out Fast

[nosmokes]

original

INTERVIEW -

Congo's "Hippies of the Forest" Apes Dying out Fast

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KINSHASA - Pygmy chimpanzees dubbed "hippies of the forest" for resolving conflicts through sex rather than violence are dying out faster than ever in post-war Democratic Republic of Congo, a conservationist said on Tuesday.

Bonobos, the rarest of all the great apes, are being killed in large numbers by bands of gunmen two years after the vast central African country's most recent war officially ended.

"In 1980, there were about 100,000 bonobos in Congo. In 1990 there were thought to be 10,000," Claudine Andre, founder of the Lola ya Bonobo (Bonobo Paradise) sanctuary just outside Kinshasa, told Reuters in an interview.



"Since then we have had two wars, their habitat has been occupied and the post-conflict period has been even harder, so I fear for what the situation is now," she said, adding that she was still receiving orphans after the war.

Experts warn bonobos, one of man's closest relatives, could die out within 50 years from poaching, logging and disease.

Hundreds of conservationists and policy makers from 23 nations are in Kinshasa this week to map out a survival plan for the world's gorillas, chimpanzees, orang-utans and bonobos.

"Bonobos are the species of great ape that is most likely to disappear," Andre said, calling to the orphaned chimpanzees through a fence separating the thickly forested sanctuary from the encroaching outskirts of the crumbling capital.

Only found in remote corners of Congo -- a vast and inaccessible country that has been torn apart by a decade of war -- the "forgotten ape" is said by scientists to be one of the least hostile primates.

"The bonobo's outlook is to search for peace," Andre said. "All their conflicts are resolved peacefully, often through sex. They are the hippies of the forest."

There are around 150 bonobos living in captivity in total but Andre hopes to rehabilitate and release some of her 43 orphans back into the wild.
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"If man destroys his closest cousin, he might destroy all animal species," she added, as a group of young bonobos drank from a bottle, ate bananas and had sex in a cage behind her.


Story by David Lewis

Story Date: 7/9/2005


© Reuters News Service 2005

[WearyOne]

1. very sad news

[ET Awful]

2. Very sad indeed.

They are such wonderful creatures . . . and just look at this face:



:(

[blindpig]

3. genocide?

I think so. These creatures are sentient IMHO. The openning of the forest by the extractive industries is the primary culprit, giving access to bushmeat hunters to areas which were previously inviolate. It's hard to argue with hungry people, protien has always been hard to come by in the forest, but the preference given to bushmeat by the locals doesn't help matters. For shame.

[thegreatwildebeest]

4. For shame what?

The San Bushman and other indigenous tribes who eat "bushmeat" have done so for millenia, and have never near approached extinction of the resource. Many indigenous tribes for years hunted what are now "rare" or "endangered" animals, that were once abundant (look at the buffalo), mostly due to the extractive industries you cite. But it's not the Bushman's fault, nor any other indigenous tribes, that westerners burn down forests, despoil the land, and keep the beast going, often times pushing indigenous people into low level factory jobs and city slums, robbing them of their ancestral land, and having the audacity to blame them for getting in the way of "Progress".

[blindpig]

5. that's a whole different thing

Hunter-gathers living in the time honored manner of human beings get no grief from me. In any case, to my knowledge there are no San in the Congo Basin.

What I'm talking about is a large scale organized hunt which supplies tons of bushmeat to the Bantu people of the cities and towns.Any and all species are taken, from pythons to chimps.

Shame on us all. High end lumber, gold and diamonds, some special mineral used in accursed cell phones, all of these things and others drive the roadbuilding which give these commercial bushmeat hunters access to areas previously unavailable.