Bushmeat Fact Sheet

What is Bushmeat?
Bushmeat is wild animal meat, including that of endangered animals, such as chimpanzees and gorillas. The meat is often smuggled across international borders and even flown into the United States.

Bushmeat hunting involves one or more of the following violations:

•Use of illegal hunting methods
•Killing of endangered, threatened or protected species
•Trespassing into protected areas and unauthorized removal of the wildlife
•Unsustainable hunting practices (over-hunting or killing animals faster than they can reproduce)

What is the Bushmeat Crisis?

•The bushmeat crisis is the illegal, unsustainable commercial trade in wildlife for food.
•Many small rural populations depend on wild animal meat for survival.
•Humans have always hunted wild animals for subsistence. Small populations can hunt sustainably by taking only what is necessary to feed their families.
•When hunters kill wild animals for commercial sale, not enough animals are left in the wild to maintain healthy populations.
•The rural communities that depend on wild animal meat for survival also suffer from this shortage.

What fuels the illegal Bushmeat Trade?

•Population growth
•Lack of alternative protein sources
•Economics and poverty
•Logging industry
•Lack of protective law enforcement
•Lack of awareness

How big is the Bushmeat Industry?

•The illegal wildlife trade does an estimated $6--20 billion of annual business, selling animals and their body parts for food, traditional medicine, pets, trophies and decorations.
•Millions of tons of illegal bushmeat are taken from Central Africa each year.

What makes this a crisis situation?

•Unsustainability (over-hunting) - According to a recent analysis of the IUCN Red List of endangered species, over-hunting ranks as a major concern for one third of the mammals and birds currently threatened with extinction.
•Logging industry - Loggers create roads into previously inaccessible forest areas, allowing bushmeat hunters to enter these areas.
•Short-term gains lead to long-term deficits. Hunting for bushmeat is very profitable in the short term, but the practice is so unsustainable that, unless an immediate and drastic change is made, the damage will be irreversible.

•(SIV, AIDS, Ebola) Because of the genetic similarity between humans and primates, there is a high risk of disease transmission between species. Simian Immunodeficiency Virus is structurally similar to the now pandemic Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Scientists believe that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, originally entered the human population through exposure to infected blood during the hunting and butchering of primates for food.
•Deadly viruses such as Ebola and Marburg Hemorrhagic Fevers, both of which lead to severe internal and external bleeding, can spread to humans who handle infected monkey tissue. There is 90% fatality rate for Ebola and Marburg and no treatment is currently available.
•A 2002 study of SIV prevalence in Cameroonian primate bushmeat and pet monkeys revealed that at least 20% of these animals have SIV.
•Anyone who handles or consumes wild-animal tissue (particularly primate tissue) is at risk of contracting a potentially fatal disease.

Conservation

•Monkeys are the third most common animal for sale in bushmeat markets.
•Great apes and other primates most commonly give birth to only one offspring a year. Therefore, when they are captured or killed, their populations take huge hits and cannot easily recover.
•If the killing of great apes proceeds at the current rate, the remaining wild apes in Africa will be gone within the next 15 to 50 years.

What can be done to stop this?

•Establish strict border controls to stop the shipment of any carcasses over international lines and waters.
•Report any suspicious hunting behavior to local fish and wildlife departments.
•Refuse to support this economy: do not buy any products made with wild or endangered animals.

Additional Information

For more information on the bushmeat crisis, please visit the following Web sites:

www.bushmeat.org
www.bushmeat.net
www.bioko.org
www.janegoodall.org

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