Slow-breeding primates threatened by ‘wildlife crime’
MARILYN NORCONK
THE trade in African primates is a lucrative business. Every year it involves hundreds of thousands of animals and threatens the survival of wild populations.
The primate trade can be local or international, legal or illegal. It’s complex and secretive, since most primates are legally protected from hunting and exportation.
International agencies, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, try to regulate and document the trade of animals and plants to protect them from over exploitation.
The illegal trade, which Interpol now recognises as “wildlife crime”, is difficult to track but of deep concern since about 60% of primate species are now threatened with extinction.
In 2017, the Observatory of Economic Complexity reported that primary exporters of primates were Asia (55%) and Africa (25%). The primary importers were North America (50%), Europe (31%) and Asia (19%).
The average value of the market for African live apes – bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas – is between $2.1 million (R31.5m) and $8.8m each year. An infant or juvenile chimpanzee is estimated to be worth as much as $70000 on the international market.
Some of the most targeted African primates for the pet trade include chimpanzees, barbary macaques (from Morocco), lemurs (from Madagascar) and galagos (bush babies).
In West Africa, it is estimated that 150000 primates – from 16 species – enter the bushmeat trade in Nigeria and Cameroon each year. The bushmeat trade – for food or magic – also takes a huge toll on primate populations. Approximately 8000 chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos are killed each year for food.
The impact of the live primate trade on wild populations is a serious problem because, along with the problem of habitat loss, it can threaten the survival of a species. For instance, the chimpanzee population has declined from an estimated 600 000 individuals to less than 250000 since the 1960s. This is primarily because of deforestation and bushmeat trade.
Because primates are slow breeders, their populations do not recover quickly. About 60% of primates are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as “vulnerable” or “threatened with extinction”.
Madagascar’s lemurs are the most threatened group of mammals in the world.
What can be done to address this? There needs to be a change in behaviour to reduce the demand for primate pets.
Potential consumers must be made aware that young primates have a low chance of survival during capture and transportation in the pet trade.
In primate habitat countries, better training and higher wages for wildlife officers are critical to reducing the pet trade.
So is community education. A good example is the Jane Goodall Institute, dedicated to the conservation of chimpanzees with its community-centred conservation approach which relies on co-operation between law enforcement, environmental education programmes and sanctuaries.
The safety of confiscated animals and their release into sanctuaries or in the wild is also important.
Ultimately, we need better enforcement of laws and people must be better educated about the negative impact of the trade on entire species. | The Conversation
Norconk is an Emeritus Professor, Kent State University.
IF EVER there was a time to pass a law criminalising apartheid denialism, it’s now.
It shouldn’t be that hard to do if the groundswell of disgust – cutting across class, creed and colour – is anything to go by after former president FW de Klerk’s utterances in the 30th anniversary interview marking his freeing of Nelson Mandela.
This week, De Klerk unequivocally and unconditionally retracted his statement that apartheid wasn’t a crime against humanity. It was the right thing to do, but he won’t be praised for it or acknowledged for that anymore than his role in helping set this country on a path to democracy with Mandela will be.
In fact, the nation’s saint and founding father, the late great Madiba himself, has found his own legacy under increasing revision by people who should know better and those who don’t know – but do have opinions. That, unfortunately, is the state we find ourselves in.
We live in a post-truth era, where opinions, particularly outlandish ones, trump (pun intended) facts if they are repeated often and stridently enough until the voices of reason are drowned out.
Apartheid was a crime against humanity. It is not measured solely by the body bags of Sharpeville, Soweto, Boipatong or all the others, but because of the fact it dehumanised millions of South Africans across generations for the benefit of a minority, aided and abetted by the many collaborators within and without the
Bantustans.
As memories dim – or never existed – there’s a tendency to revise history, especially as pressure mounts to distract rather than debate current crises.
Last Thursday night, the EFF pulled a masterstroke at the very moment President Cyril Ramaphosa was trying to do just that, because the wonderful distraction of putting the boot into an old – and wholly irrelevant – man is far more alluring than putting real solutions on the table for discussion.
Dali Mpofu wants to launch a bid to have De Klerk stripped of the Nobel prize De Klerk was awarded with Madiba, glossing over the fact that while the two of them were trying to chart a way from apartheid to democracy, Mpofu’s most public contribution was to break up Mandela’s marriage to Winnie. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi wants Mangosuthu Buthelezi to get the Nobel prize instead, airbrushing the carnage in the Vaal townships and the killing fields of KZN.
If apartheid denialism was criminalised, we wouldn’t have to stomach the Opportunist-in-chief Julius Malema, in the off phase of his on-off-on sycophancy towards Jacob Zuma infamously railing that black South Africans had it better under apartheid.
We dare not forget, we dare not trivialise the suffering or sanitise it, not just because it’s cravenly wrong, but because if we do forget we allow the oppression to happen again – this time with new oppressors.
We worry about children not being able to read for meaning, but we are creating a society so confused and so gullible that it could actually believe Tchaikovsky wrote Swan Lake after being inspired by Barbie’s Swan Princess.
Just look at Busisiwe
Mkhwebane.
Ritchie is a journalist and a former newspaper editor.