11/13/2000 @ 12:00AM

The Bushmeat Crisis

The first thing you learn when having lunch with the famous primatologist Jane Goodall, 66, is that she doesn’t really eat. A strict vegetarian, Goodall ordered a plate of vegetables, then took most of them back to her hotel room so she wouldn’t have to waste money on food that evening. The second thing you learn is she can’t get used to waste, period. When I pushed my vegetables away, she asked whether she could take them, too. No problem.

The serene, even ethereal, Goodall is the Mother Teresa of the simian world. She lives not for food but for chimpanzees.

Born in London, Goodall found Africa in 1957. Her quiet observations of chimpanzees in the Gombe preserve of Tanzania altered the very definition of the human animal. Among her discoveries were that chimps have minds, personalities and feelings. Forty years and 17 books later, she has earned the right to rest on her laurels. But no resting for Goodall, who wears her trademark ponytail and looks the same as she did in her twenties. Through her Jane Goodall Institute, she is on a feverish crusade to save her animals from extinction. “We have only a small window [of time],” she says somberly.

The blame, she tells us, does not lie with the logging companies. Most of them, Goodall says, practice sustainable logging, not deforestation: Instead of clearing out a forest, they take down selected trees of a certain size and within a certain distance of each other. The real culprits are the African people themselves.

She explains that African people have never developed a taste for domesticated animals. Chickens and cattle have never been cost-effective to breed. Instead, Africans want their bushmeat, and that’s not changing, even as they move to urban areas. Bushmeat is just about anything that moves in a forest: gorillas, apes and monkeys, elephant, duikers (a type of antelope), porcupines, cane rats, bush pigs, guinea fowl and lizards. Primates and porcupines are said to taste sweet. The most affluent of the middle class will even sponsor a gorilla hunt, its meat is so prized. Though killing endangered species is illegal, law enforcement barely exists.

More demand for bushmeat comes from the tens of thousands of people in the logging camps. The logging jobs are like magnets, and a single employee might draw a dozen family members, who must also be fed in camp. Endangered or not, if it’s crawling, it’s food.

A million tons of wildlife are being stripped annually from the forest, felled mainly by commercial hunters with automatic weapons. Even rapidly reproducing animals like duikers and cane rats are being killed at a rate that’s not sustainable. “They hack it up, smoke it and cart it off on logging roads,” says Goodall with obvious distaste. “Anyone trying to stop these butchers from using the roads is threatened with death. Half the time people don’t even know what animal they’re eating!”

Composing herself a moment, she goes on: The logging roads pushed into previously unreachable areas. Pygmies, who once hunted just for themselves, now hunt for hire. “Pygmies used to kill only what they needed, and never killed a mother,” says Goodall. “Now they kill indiscriminately, because they are given guns and are paid for quantity.”

According to Goodall, the African locals are eating their future. When the wildlife is gone, the indigenous forest people will starve. And without the animals, there’s no chance of creating a tourism industry.

The bushmeat crisis, as it is being described, is the single largest threat to wildlife in central and western Africa. “Within ten years Africa could lose all apes,” she says. Some organizations, like the newly created Bushmeat Crisis Task Force, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, predict that it could be closer to five. The chimpanzee population was close to 2 million at the beginning of the last century. It is now less than 150,000 and going down fast.

Talking about eating cane rats and chimpanzees doesn’t help our appetites. We rest our forks to talk about what is hopeful–that Goodall believes that the best way to curb this slaughter is to work with the various business entities that have a stake in Africa’s future. Conoco, for example, which has oil interests in the Congo basin, built a sanctuary for chimpanzees orphaned by the bushmeat trade. Most promising are steps taken by Socit Congolaise Industrielle de Bois (CIB) the giant German timber company with operations in Congo. It has agreed to confiscate unauthorized guns from workers hunting for food and is importing meat to feed them. Others are looking at farming cane rats, fast breeders that are considered tasty dishes.

Economically speaking, bushmeat is sold at too low a price, because it does not reflect the true cost to future generations that will not have bushmeat to eat or even look at. If CIB’s actions become a model, bushmeat will become scarcer, raising the price to local people. While this may also raise the price of the prized African mahogany, it would reflect the cost of saving large numbers of the precious wildlife left in the world.

With so many dire problems facing humans, why should we care? Goodall tells us kindly that most people do understand, and that she rarely has to explain. Suddenly, from across the table, she reaches for my hand, and shows me what David Greybeard, a chimpanzee, taught her in her early days in Africa. Goodall offered him a nut, and he made a point of pushing the nut away and giving her hand a gentle squeeze of recognition to let her know that their relationship was not about the food.

A last question: “Do chimps smile?” No, she says, they make a noise that means they recognize you. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” she says gutturally, sounding very apelike. “They do have a play face. But it’s not the big grin that you see. That grin is actually fear.” Jane Goodall’s fear is that her chimpanzee friends–our close relatives–are on the road to extinction.

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