A lament for our fellow brethren

"The Bushmeat Commercial Market"

Environmental Social Justice Issue Revisited: the Illicit Bushmeat Trade

There is corrupt business afoot in the world when animals are poached, their carcasses distributed across a secondary-market for food and other commodities. The destructive affair has led to the deterioration of animal species, notably the gorilla, chimpanzee, and bonobo populations in Africa. Bushmeat hunters will slaughter 200 billion dollars worth of animals this year, including 8,000 endangered apes. According to the Bushmeat Project, an environmental and humanitarian group that initiates alternative wage-earning opportunities for equatorial Africans, “[p]eople pay a premium to eat more great apes each year than are now kept in all the zoos and laboratories of the world. If the slaughter continues at its current pace, the remaining wild apes in Africa will be gone within the next fifteen to fifty years” (bushmeat.net). Partnerships between animal conservation groups across the world have increased awareness and specific concern for the people seeking economic recourse in a destructive trade that not only affects the biosphere of west and central Africa, but an indigenous way of life. A significant mantra of environmental organizations is to turn “poachers into protectors,” in an attempt to divert financial interest in hunting and logging to conservation and tourism. Evoking empathy from the public and encouraging resistance toward purchasing bushmeat, progress has been made; take away the incentives and commercial hunting of endangered species will hopefully wane.