Road kill in Cameroon

Natural History, Feb, 1997 by Michael McRae

Along with timber, logging trucks in West-central Africa carry the smoked carcasses of monkeys and apes to market.

Red dust coated everything in. Otoumoukad: the thatch-roofed huts, the drying laundry, the neatly tended plots of cassava and maize, the jungle greenery crowding in on all sides. The little roadside settlement lay deep in the tropical forest of southeastern Cameroon, near the frontier with the Central African Republic. By 9:00 A.M., the air was already heavy with humidity. Each time another logging truck rumbled past, clouds of dust as fine as talcum boiled up from the road and drifted over the village.

Swiss photographer Karl Ammann and I had driven to Otoumoukad that morning after hearing rumors that someone in the village had a baby gorilla. Along with us were Reinhard Behrend, of the German rain forest group Rettet den Regenwald (Save the Rain Forest); our translator, Celestin Bitongolo Nkou; and Alfred, our lead-footed driver, who sped off in search of the car's grill, which had shaken loose on the rough roads.

The rumors proved correct. We found the infant gorilla cowering in the corner of a dark, one-room mud hut, grinding its teeth and straining against its tether. The owner explained in French that its parents had been shot two weeks earlier by a village hunter. The male had been wounded as it charged in self-defense but had managed to flee. The female died clutching her baby. She was then field dressed, packed out of the bush, cooked, and eaten. Her baby was being kept as a pet or possibly for sale to a passing trucker.

Ammann and I had arrived in Cameroon a week earlier to attend an upcoming conference on the growing commerce in "bushmeat," as game meat is called, and the role that the logging industry plays in facilitating the trade. The conference was to be held in a week's time in Bertoua, the capital of Cameroon's eastern province. With time on our hands, we had planned a foray to the frontline of the bushmeat business. After meeting Behrend in Yaounde, the country's capital, we had taken the night train to Bertoua and the next day hired Alfred to take us south and east to Yokadouma to visit a logging concession. It was there we had heard about the orphan in Otoumoukad.

The traumatized eighteen-month-old baby was obviously close to death. "Il est mechant," the owner cautioned us: "He's mean." Not surprisingly, the baby had nipped him several times. Behrend and I took a step back, leery that gorillas, like chimpanzees, might harbor the Ebola virus. Two months earlier, thirteen villagers in Gabon had succumbed to Ebola after feasting on a dead chimp they had discovered in the forest. Investigators later found two dead gorillas near the village and were warning people in Gabon not to touch any dead animals or to shoot any game animal that was behaving strangely. The isolated outbreak had occurred less than 200 miles from where we were.

Ammann reached down to stroke the terrified infant, uttering a series of throaty pacifying vocalizations--"eh, eh, eh." The baby bared its teeth but instead of attacking hid its face behind upraised arms.

"That is one of the most distressing sights," said Ammann, emerging from the windowless hut into the blinding equatorial sun. The scene was all too familiar to him but still profoundly disturbing. In eight years of documenting the bushmeat trade in central and West Africa, he had encountered scores of orphan apes in similar straits: the unfortunates who had survived a hunter's shotgun blast and hadn't ended up in the pot themselves. Some he had managed to deliver to animal orphanages; most were doomed to live as pets--at least until they perished from malnourishment, disease, or depression. Freeing an animal into the wild is not an option, as an orphan cannot fend for itself.

"This one will live only a few more days," Ammann said, wiping the sweat and dust from his face. "Chimpanzees have the will to live if they're separated from their family, but gorillas fall into a depressive state and just give up on life." The baby's only chance of survival lay in transporting it to an animal sanctuary.

Next to chimpanzees, gorillas are our closest relatives. But the kinship of apes and humans did not, by itself, explain the depth of Ammann's anguish. In 1988, he and his wife, who live in the Kenyan highlands, had acquired a chimpanzee from a riverboat trader in Zaire. The once sickly bushmeat orphan had blossomed into a robust, animated, playful adolescent, and Ammann dotes on him as he would an only child. As a surrogate parent, Ammann has gained insights into the nature of apes--and a compassion for them--that only someone who lives with animals can.

Adopting a chimpanzee changed the course of Ammann's life. A photographer whose work has resulted in three books on African predators and one on great apes, he undertook a crusade "to get the public riled up" about the growing commerce in bushmeat--specifically the meat of western lowland gorillas and chimpanzees, but also of such protected species as elephants, giant pangolins, and mandrills, rare baboons with vivid scarlet-and-blue facial markings. After eight years of trekking through West and central Africa, often enduring miserable conditions, he considers himself to be the world authority on bushmeat. "There are people who are experts in their own countries," he asserts, "but as far as range, no one has done the kind of investigating that I have."