Eating Apes

What animals we eat are selected by what culture we grow up in. Distant societies think nothing of eating dogs. Some closer ones think eating horse is completely acceptable. Then there are frogs, snakes, and insect larvae. It is all a matter of getting enough protein. One man's protein is another man's atrocity. Americans are used to eating meat they find in Styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic, but the indigenous peoples of central Africa have always eaten the animals living around them: elephants, antelopes, porcupines, rodents, and so on. They don't mind a stew of gorilla or a chimp's sirloin, and what of it? It's the way they have always done things. Tribal languages, in fact, often use the same word for wild animal as they do for meat. The world, however, is not the way it always was, and a shocking book, _Eating Apes_ (University of California Press) by Dale Peterson, shows that apes on the menu is not something the world ought to continue to accept.We ourselves are members of the tribe of great apes; chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are on the branch with us. But if African tribes don't share our scientific view or our squeamishness, traditional hunters, in predation balance over the centuries, surely are not going to do lasting harm. Traditional hunting, however, is no longer traditional. There has been an invasion from outside the continent by logging companies, making huge profits from our demand for hardwoods. The companies have lots of workers, many of them from the region, and all the workers have to be fed. Hunters, many of whom are also from the region, are hired to bring in the protein. Bows, arrows, and nets have given way to the far more efficient and deadly wire snares and automatic rifles and shotguns. Perhaps if greater firepower were the only threat to our primate cousins, they could still make it. But we are destroying their habitat (again, mostly by logging), and primates will suffer before other species because of their slow rate of reproduction. There are plenty of species headed toward extinction, but few because we are eating them, and none so close to us evolutionarily. In addition, butchering the apes may be the way humans got HIV and Ebola viruses. It may well be that you haven't heard of the problem of eating apes into extinction because the conservation organizations are keeping quiet about such a downer of a message, and because they are, believe it or not, in partnership with the loggers.What will be needed is the courage to challenge cultural convictions. It is possible for the West to value (or at least claim to value) sensitivity to other cultures, but in the case of eating apes, it will have to impose scientific knowledge of close kinship, risk of disease, and impending loss of primates to get the native cultures to change. It may even be possible within the corporate culture, which mines habitats to get at profits, to insist not just on sustainable development (a nebulous

As a primatology student, I am often asked by friends, with a hopeful look in their eyes, if I believe in the existence of Bigfoot, a giant ape dwelling in the forests of the American Northwest. I hate to do it, but I always have to rain on the parade and say there is no compelling evidence for such a creature. I then explain to them that there actually is a Bigfoot, and a Littlefoot as well, living today, but they do not live in America. My friends get excited and ask me where...but their interest rapidly diminishes when I tell them they are the great apes of Africa and Southeast Asia: the gorilla (Bigfoot) and the chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans (Littlefeet). These are beings with self awareness and complex social lives who use tools, eat medicinal plants and pass their traditions down from generation to generation. I feel that we are dulled by familiarity into not realizing how very lucky we are that these amazing, sentient cousins of ours still share the world with us in their tropical strongholds...and hence are not doing what we ought to to prevent their ongoing slaughter. If the current administration proposed clear-cutting the forest in which the (mythical) Sasquatch lived, I have no doubt that thousands of people woud rush to that forest and chain themselves to trees, do whatever it took, to save them. And yet the great apes are being eliminated with nary a hand raised in protest. "Eating Apes" describes with shocking clarity the astonishing failure of the conservation community to mobilize the world to save our closest cousins. The message of the impassioned text, backed up by Karl Ammann's brutally riveting photographs, is: enough of the feel-good "win some small battles while losing the war (but publicize the hell out of the small wins)" mentality. Action is called for, and now. Anyone who has ever been enchanted by the grandeur of African wild places and the Bigfoots and Littlefoots who live in them should read this book now. Time is running out.

Eating Apes is well written in a comfortable style. This excellent and easy to read style is contrasted with the disturbing facts it presents of the ongoing genocides motivated by western civilizations penchant for greed and power. When you consider that indigenous human peoples of Africa have shared the forests with our fellow apes for thousands of years without destroying each other it is easy to determine who is responsible for this disaster. Consider the fact that our western civilization has yet to come across a people (ape or otherwise) who have lived in harmony with nature who we have not destroyed. This book chronicles the latest such destruction with regard to chimpanzees, gorillas and the human forest foragers as well as the forest in which they live. Peterson and Amman's book is a bold and brave j'accuse of the logging and conservation organizations who are spearheading this latest attack. You must read this book. And then you must follow the advice of Peterson and Amman as to what you can do to help stop it. Finally, you must act now, because there is very little time left for our kin in the forests.

This book is hard to read as you try and fall asleep at night. Dale Peterson's vivid and disturbing account of the bushmeat crisis gives little comfort for those who would rather think of fun animals in the wild. What he documents is the decimation of both species and culture in a readable way. This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand how animal protection, conservation, economics, mendacity, and venality combining in the ruination of a species. I was gripped by the language and distraught by the images. Not an easy book to read, BUT an absolute must read, It is superb in detail and construct and will make a difference

I have been seeing references to the African trade in wild meat, including primates, for a couple of years now--Jane Goodall mentions it in her talks--but searched unsuccessfully for an intelligent guide to the issue. Now it's here, and it's clear that this subject is urgent, appalling, and very very complex. Dale Peterson's gift is to explain the crisis in accessible terms, dispassionately (though the problem arouses passions across the political spectrum), with a wealth of information, and in a lucid, utterly compelling manner. With Karl Ammann, who took the riveting photgraphs, Peterson has visited the meat markets where ape meat is sold as exotic--not subsistence--food, tracked the loggers whose commercial enterprises have opened up the forests to hunters on a scale heretofore unimagined and completely unsustainable, and walked into hunting camps and interviewed the hunters themselves. The story of one of these men, Joseph Melloh, gives the book a human face and a narrative frame; one of the most powerful effects of this study of cultural and political conflict is that it reads like a novel, with this man at its heart, and we see the issues through African eyes--no First World condescension to Third World problems. The book also shows the full range of the catastrophe--environmental, economic, political, social, and ethical--while at the same time showing how readers can make a difference through a few simple steps, by working to change public opinion and shift economic goals. The great apes are humans' closest relatives, and we are destroying them. This book faces a crisis that most people are hardly aware of, and explains it in a way that makes change thinkable and possible. ...