The hammers can be artificially rounded, quite heavy stones the anvils may be flat stones with deeply worn pockets. The chimpanzees in this part of West Africa possess a stone and wood technology, striking hammers against anvils to crack otherwise uncrackable nuts. Primate researcher Christophe Boesch and I followed a group of wild chimpanzees as they moved on their daily circuit, a complex progression from food to food to food, from obscure fruits to tender herbs to hard nuts. I first heard an ape laugh while walking in the great Taï Forest of Côte d'Ivoire, in West Africa. Those distressing and particular issues require their own book, however, and thus, with a sincere apology to the lovers of orangutans and to the orangutans themselves, Eating Apes focuses on the three nonhuman ape species still enduring on the African continent: gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos.īut Eating Apes is a also book about people, in particular two individuals who became variously involved in the subject and problem: Karl Ammann, the determined and difficult man who took all the photographs appearing in this book, and Joseph Melloh, the gorilla hunter from Cameroon who became Karl's friend.Īpes are distinguished as being among the very few items on the menu capable (before preparation) of laughter as an expression of mirth. Supposedly "protected" habitat for orangutans has been declining by 50 percent per decade in recent times, which suggests that the red-haired Asian ape could be the first of the four modern apes to go extinct. The 20,000 remaining wild orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra in Southeast Asia are threatened with their own distinctive balance of problems, which include an illegal trade in live animals and the wholesale devastation of forests by logging, much of it blatantly illegal. Yes, we are at this historical moment rapidly eating and in other ways pushing our closest relatives into the dark chasm of nonexistence. The consumption of apes as it occurs today throughout much of their range combines with other threats (such as habitat destruction) to promise imminent extinctions. To express the matter a little differently, this book is about hard choices and serious ethical and cultural conflicts. They are special beings who observe the world through eyes and faces like ours, who manipulate the world with hands and bodies like ours, who experience and display emotions entirely recognizable to us, who make and use tools, who live in astonishingly humanlike social systems and deal with each other politically, who show clear evidence of awareness and foresight, who are capable of learning symbolic language, and who laugh in situations you and I might consider worthy of amusement.įrom my own perspective, the ongoing slaughter of apes for sweet food is a bitter nightmare, and so this book touches subjects that people may prefer not to talk or think or read about. They are our sibling species, who share with us between 96 and 99 percent of their genetic code. And yet the act of eating apes is itself distinctively destructive because of who they are. Eating apes is part of a much larger process, the rapidly increasing consumption of wild animal meat from all species in many, perhaps most forested places around the world. But today, with the loss of traditional ways in Africa, with the arrival of modern weapons, modern population growth, and modern cities, and with the unprecedented opening of African forests by European and Asian timber companies, the consumption of wild animal meat has suddenly exploded in scope and impact, moving from what was until recently a subsistence activity to become an enormous commercial enterprise. So there is nothing special about the fact that people living in and near forests of West and Central Africa happen to eat wild animal meat and probably have been doing so since human appetite began. Introduction People hunt and eat wild animals for protein all over the globe: in the Americas, in Asia and Southeast Asia, essentially wherever there are pieces of wilderness with wild animals left in them.
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