Illegal chimpanzee meat on the menu at UK weddings

CHIMPANZEE meat is being served as a delicacy at British weddings and sold as “bush meat” on market stalls, it has emerged.

The Border Force is under pressure to introduce DNA testing to identify the meat at customs and stop imports.

Dr Ben Garrod, a leading primate scientist, has said he was told by customs officials just weeks ago that a ton of bush meat from West Africa had been confiscated on a flight bound for the US. The meat was also routinely smuggled into Europe and the UK, he said.

Dr Garrod said the meat could cause the spread of serious disease because it was often unsanitary and chimpanzees were genetically very similar to humans,

The University of East Anglia professor has called for DNA testing to be used on meat imports, and for more resources to be put into research in order to stop the trade.

“It’s rife. It’s in all the major cities across Europe and the US. We have seen bush meat confiscated in the UK in checkpoints at borders and in markets,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Chimpanzee experts have urged the Government to take action. Dr Jane Goodall PhD, who founded primate charity the Jane Goodall Institute, said: “The smuggling of bush meat is an alarming issue. As Ben Garrod says, there is danger of disease spreading from the bush meat to humans.”

The conservationist has been working with primates since the Sixties and was the first person to discover that chimpanzees make and use tools. She added: “Much of the meat is from threatened or endangered species. Interpol is becoming increasingly involved in animal trafficking and could, perhaps, be persuaded to take a more active role in the bush meat smuggling.”

She added that if DNA testing was too costly, “dogs could be trained to detect bush meat”.

In 2011, chimpanzee meat was understood to have been detected during a Trading Standards raid in

the West Midlands. A year previously, the first research on the import of bush meat into Europe found more than 270 tons passing through the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris alone.

Dr Garrod said bush meat was being sold at markets in many British cities, and was often eaten as a delicacy at weddings and christenings. The meat, he said, sells for up to five times the price of prime cuts of beef or pork. “It’s often brought to the country for specific celebrations like a wedding or a christening. We aren’t targeting a cultural group but it is an illegal activity,” said Dr Garrod.

Smugglers, he said, found duping border security officers relatively easy because the meat was smoked and blackened, making it difficult to identify unless there was a hand attached that clearly belonged to a primate. “With advances in DNA analysis and the price of them coming down, it’s not unreasonable that we could be checking for these things,” he said

The professor, whose new book, The Chimpanzee and Me, is out next month, warned that the “next big pandemic” could be spread through illegally smuggled chimpanzee meat. He said: “HIV originally came from primates. We are so similar, so the potential is there for various pathogens and viruses to be transmitted or mutate.”

A government spokesman said: “As well as working with enforcement and intelligence partners in the UK and internationally, Border Force continues to invest in training and equipment to ensure that we do all we can to intercept illegal foodstuffs and crack down on smugglers.”