in all the major markets, irrespective of it being closed or open hunting season,” Mr. Amman wrote in 1998 in one of his regular broadsides, published in various newsletters and on the Internet. “While the meat of protected species was disguised in some markets, it was openly on display in others. On our first evening in Ouesso, the gateway to the renowned Nouabale Ndoki National Park, we filmed a lorry carrying hundreds of kilos of bush meat, including the carcass of a silverback gorilla.”
Mr. Amman said the bush meat trade had “been commercialized to the point where it has become an integral part of the economy, the problem well beyond the scope of conservation organizations.” Even the loggers had to throw in the towel, he said: one executive of a major French firm told CNN that his company was now afraid of the poachers, who had automatic weapons; some German loggers, weary of the bad publicity, in 1997 asked the transporters of their timber to tell their drivers to stop carrying bush meat. The drivers went on strike, and the loggers and transporters gave in.
Mr. Amman did some shopping to compare the price difference between bush meat and that of domesticated species, such as pork and beef. “We went to the Yaounde bush meat market and bought two gorilla arms,” he wrote. “We then acquired the equivalent amount of beef. Next, we bought the frozen head of a chimpanzee and matched it with a much bigger pig’s head. We took all this back to the hotel and stuck on price tags to illustrate that beef and pork were less than half the price of gorilla and chimp.”
For many outside third-world countries, mainly in Europe and the United States, eating primates is not within the range of acceptable behavior.
“Understandably, many of us who study and conserve primates are uncomfortable seeing them on the menu,” Dr. Anthony Rose of the Biosynergy Institute wrote in 1998 in Pan Africa News. “This discomfort may be ego-centric, born of our own personal eating taboos or our concern that animals at our field sites may be killed before we’ve finished our research. It may be anthropocentric—a manifestation of our reluctance to eat anything so human-like as a gorilla or baboon. Or it may come from a bio-centric concern for individuals and species that are on the verge of extinction, high on the food chain, or demonstrably sentient and subject to suffering.”
In Trouble Again
Redmond O’Hanlon is an anthropologist-cum-travel writer of massive talent and eccentricity. His books which chronical treks into the jungles of Borneo, south America, and Africa, have won best-seller and cult status. In his second, In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon (1990), he tells a story about shooting a howler monkey “about the size of a cocker spaniel.”
“Chimo and Pablo spread palm fronds on the ground and began to prepare the Howler monkey, scalding it with boiling water and scraping off the fur. Its skin turned white, like a baby’s.
“That night, when Pablo had jointed the body and Galvis boiled it, Chimo handed me a suspiciously full mess-tin. As I spooned out the soup, the monkey’s skull came into view, thinly covered with its red meat, the eyes still in their sockets.
’We gave it to you specially,’ said Chimo with great seriousness, sitting on a log beside me, taking another fistful of manioc from the tin and adding it to his own bowl. ‘It’s an honor in our country. If you eat the eyes, we will have good luck.’
“The skull bared its broken teeth at me. I picked it up, put my lips to the rim of each socket in turn, and sucked. The eyes came away from their soft stalks and slid down my throat.
“Chimo put his bowl down, folded his hands on his paunch, and roared with laughter.
‘You savage!’ he shouted. ‘You horrible naked savage! Don’t you think it looks like a man? Eh? How could you do a disgusting thing like that?’”
Redmond O’Hanlon, In Trouble Again
A Bushman cave painting at Giant’s Castle in South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains shows early spear-wielding hunters and their prey. Mankind’s hunter-gatherer origins are responsible for a lingering fascination with “bush meat.”
Whatever the reasoning, there is now an alliance of more than thirty international organizations trying to change a diet that has existed for millennia, not only in Africa, but also in South America and in South and Southeast Asia. Together, they argue urgency, because hunting methods have changed. Not so long ago, the animals were hunted with bows and arrows, spears, and nets, the only goal being to put food on the family table, with occasional surplus carcasses being sold in the village market or shared without charge with other villagers. Today, automatic rifles and shotguns are used and the same trucks that took the hunters into the forest also take the fresh meat out. Even some traditional riverboats now have freezers.
Thus, more bush meat is reaching the marketplace faster and more efficiently, as the market itself continues to expand. A study conducted in 1997 in Ouesso, a small town in Congo (pop. 11,000), reported more than six tons of bush meat was sold each week in a market that offered eight different kinds of monkey and gorillas.
Nor is the market limited to African dinner tables. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature reported in 1998 that chimpanzee and gorilla were on menus as far away as Paris and Brussels, where the meat was served dried, smoked, cut into steaks and cooked in a rich, gamey stew. Monkey is also a popular dish in rural areas of southern China and Southeast Asia.
However threatening all this may sound, many if not most of the jungle animals found on Equatorial restaurant menus or in diets in tropical countries around the world are not on any endangered list. While it can be said safely that so many primates are on such lists—the gorilla, the chimp, the orangutan, one species of baboon and more than a dozen species of monkey—probably they should not be eaten, even when their populations are sizeable. However, there are other kinds of bush meat, or what is called “bush tucker” in Australia.
Three countries in Africa—Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa-export game meat to Europe, and a number of private game ranches now invite hunters to go on an old-fashioned safari reminiscent of the time when Ernest Hemingway championed big game hunting fifty years ago. Here, today, if the hunter can pay the price, he can shoot eland, impala, kudu, duuiker, springbok, bush pig, zebra, and hartebeest.
It’s easy to guess what Hemingway would think of the number of “jungle restaurants” that opened in many cities worldwide. These included two African restaurants called Carnivore, one in his beloved Kenya and the other in South Africa. The first opened in 1980 just outside Nairobi and is now one of Kenya’s most popular tourist attractions. Here, two different game meats are offered each day depending on what’s available, cooked over a massive charcoal pit that dominates the entrance and is carried around the restaurant on traditional Masai machetes and carved right onto the diners’ sizzling cast-iron plates. During the peak months of December and January in 1997, the Nairobi restaurant served thirteen thousand customers a month, seventy percent of them tourists. The restaurant’s standard dinner included crocodile raised on a farm near the coast, along with zebra, eland, Cape buffalo, hartebeest, gazelle, giraffe, impala, camel, oryx, wildebeest, and ostrich. They call it “gnu-velle cuisine.” (Their joke, not mine.)
Similar restaurants exist around the globe. In Australia, there are dozens of places where what is called bush tucker is served, “tucker” being slang for food, the menu offering what once was considered fit only for the aboriginal population. Today, kangaroo fillets and ostrich steaks and crocodile satay are not only acceptable, but desirable. Here and elsewhere, the “exotic” or “jungle” restaurants resemble the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood, where the theme seems more important than the food.
For example, African Heartbeat in Singapore runs Discovery Channel documentaries on its closed-circuit television system as it dishes up Ostrich Potjiekos (stew) with Polenta and Fresh Vegetables, African Caesar Salad with Venison Biltong Shavings, and Pan Fried Crocodile with Papadums and Spring Onion Relish. Prices at such places are in the luxury class. It is as if the proprietors decided that the best way to make food that once was considered fit only for the “natives” was to ask an exorbitant price for it.
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