Rhino Horn and Bling

-->In my post of 17^th August I referred to a fine piece of undercover detective work carried out by Karl Amman. It is titled Hanoi Connection, The Rhino Horn Mafia. In this 26 minute video he shows how the rhino horn trade has exploded and gone mainstream in Hanoi. So much so that there are large quantities of false horn now available on the market as demand has grown. 
I had thought that this was driven by the TCM market, with the added extra component of an alleged used for dealing with hangovers and so-called rhino horn parties at which the stuff is ground on specially designed plates, suspended in fluid and drunk.

Of course this moves the use of the horn into the conspicuous consumption field, and Karl has very recently taken his investigation a lot further. 

Rhino horn is now used as bling. 

His full story is up on his website and will also appear in the East Africna Wildlife Society's flagship magazine Swara. For lovers of wildlife stories, and an edgy apporoach to today's issues, you could not do better than subscribe. Here are a couple of Karl's pictures from the bling story.

A horn shop in Hanoi at left and a
 transaction underway at right

I decided to find out a bit more about bling and of course the first place to look was on Google. I knew it is a word that has only come into the lexicon in recent times. I had not realized how recent. One source states that it is of Jamaican origin and was first used by the Silvertones in their December 2002 song Bling Bling Christmas. It is such a good word that it is now in common use throughout the English-speaking world. Various definitions are offered. A simple one is Flash and sparkle; glamour. Another puts it this way: The word "bling" refers to any unnecessary accumulation of metal or jewellery which impresses the simple-minded.

I fell to thinking about bling in a wider context. Of course there are plenty of recent references to things like fancy engagement rings and so on, but the truth is that humans were using bling long before it became a word. 

Witness the widespread used of animal parts by people all over the world for who knows how long.

Joy Adamson’s fascinating 1967 book The Peoples of Kenya has dozens of her photos and paintings showing tribesmen dressed in an extraordinary array of skins, feathers, bones and horns. Many of the original works have been shown in Nairobi’s National Museum, once known as the Coryndon Museum.

Ostrich feathers were not only worn by Kenyan and other African warriors. They became a fashion statement for western women and ostrich famers of the late 19^th and very early 20^th centuries profited mightily. Then came the motorcar. Most cars were open to the elements and the industry took a hit. 

In my copy of the 1982 The Elk of North America is a picture of a beautiful young girl of the Dakota Sioux Nation nation who is wearing a ceremonial dress covered in approximately 1700 canine teeth (aka bugle teeth) of a wapiti.

Some of the tribesmen of Papua New Guinea are famous for wearing all sorts of bling. Perhaps the most well-known are the bones through their nasal septa and the Koteka or penis sheath worn by many, mainly highland, tribes. 

Last weekend my wife and I watched a PBS movie made by Ken Burns. It is titled The National Parks: America's Best Idea and tells a remarkable story. The bling issue arose there as well, in a way I knew nothing about. A hundred and ten years ago egrets in the Florida Everglades were shot in unimaginable numbers - 5 million a year. All the feathers, and some whole birds, were used to decorate women's hats! 

"Wanda in wild feathers." A photo from the early 1900s

Almost 95% of the species were wiped out and the feathers for the hats had to be obtained during the nesting season.

The movie’s narrator recounts how a naturalist, going for a stroll in New York, saw 542 feathered hats with material from 40 different species.

Numerous attempts were made to halt the slaughter and an Audubon Society campaign failed. Only when a government congressman named John F Lacey got something done did things improve! 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Is the use of rhino horn bracelet worn opposite a $15,000 Rolex watch (and costing about as much) just the latest manifestation of an ancient human trait?

Rhino horn's long tradtion in TCM

I have been writing about the war between humans and wildlife, and specifically the rhino wars for at least ten years.
 

With 536 rhinos killed in South Africa by the end of July, it seems highly likely that the death toll for the year will surpass 2012′s shocking 668 and may even reach 1,000. At this point the kill may exceed the number of calves born.

It is very clear that whatever policing efforts are made, and however much pressure is brought to bear by almost anyone, the consumption of rhino horn in the Orient for medicinal purposes is not going to stop. It has been going on for centuries and some populations of rhino have collapsed because of it.

There were rhino in many parts of southern China until at least the 15^th century. They are long gone, all victims of the insatiable consumption of TCM products. Black rhino numbers have plummeted since I worked on them in the 1960s and 1970s. Where there were once as many as 20,000 members of this species in Kenya there are perhaps 600 today. Africa’s total 2013 black rhino population is thought to be about 6,000. 

It is not just China and Vietnam. In The Trouble With Lions I cited one example, among many of this attitude. I quoted a 1993 TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce) report by Judy Mills in which she wrote that 60% of Korean doctors believe that horn is an effective medication and 79% say that it is essential for a wide variety of ailments.

On top of that 20-year old report has come the claim of its efficacy in the treatment of some forms of cancer, it’s effectiveness for hangovers (suggested to be a “Ferrari” effect) and very recently the claim that it is an aphrodisiac. This last was only ever a factor in India’s state of Gujarat and a small tribe in Uganda. It was misrepresented in western media (sex sells!) and I would bet that the same snake-oil salesman who dreamed up the cancer thing found yet another way to market his product in the Orient.

There has been a tremendous upsurge in control methods in several parts of Africa, especially in South Africa, where some 75% of rhinos are located. Most of these are in the Kruger National Park, and it is along the park’s long and porous border with Mozambique that many of the poachers operate, slipping back into their home country with impunity. There have been recent suggestions by enforcement agencies that so-called “hot pursuit” may be permitted, but it will require the agreement of the two countries to make it happen.

The bottom line – nobody is ever going to completely stop the rhino horn trade with enforcement. As people get richer the demand will increase.

This is surely in part because of cultural biases that may not be well understood by Westerners.

A telling new documentary filmed and produced by Karl Amman takes a look at the issue. It is 26 minutes long, but well worth the time.

The attitude of many, perhaps a large majority, of Chinese people and others in Southeast Asia is that animals were put on earth for the use of humans. 

Tiger parts and deer antler velvet on sale in a Chinese pharmacy

Why then would anyone in that part of the world be bothered if rhino (and many other species) are killed, eaten and used in other ways. Witness the relentless killing of tigers documented by John Vaillant in his book Tiger.  

 

On a stopover in Beijing in 2008 I happened upon a copy of the English edition of the China Daily News and was astonished to read of one tiger farm where some 500 of the animals are bred for TCM use. Digging further led me to a 1994 article in the Vancouver sun on this same topic. Lion bones are now an export item from hunt farms in South Africa.

Of course the Chinese are not the only people who believe that we humans have the right to use animals in any way we choose. There is a mistranslation in the bible’s book of Genesis. In 1989 Michael W. Fox put the record straight.

"While in the book of Genesis we read that man has God-given dominion over the rest of creation, the original meaning of the word dominion is not to have power over and exploit all of life for our own ends.  The original meaning of dominion comes from the Hebrew root verb 'yorade', which means literally to come down to, to live in sympathy, respect and harmony with other creatures."

Michael W. Fox —, Steps Toward a Humane, Sustainable Agriculture, 1989 [HSUS MS, p 8].

It is not as if the use of animal parts is confined to oriental people. In his book Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn Richard Ellis has done an extraordinary amount of research and recounts some of the text of one Thomas Culpeper’s 17^th century catalogue in Culpeper's Complete Herbal: A Book of Natural Remedies for Ancient Ills.  He lists over 150 animals parts that apothecaries (the pharmacists of their day) had to stock. Among the most bizarre to 21^st century eyes were:

“The fat, grease, or suet of a duck, goose, eel, boar, heron, thymallows (if you know where to get it) and over twenty other creatures including a vulture (if you can catch them).” I Googled thymallows as I have no idea what that might be. The site took me back to Culpeper and I am none the wiser.

Culpeper also lists “the horn of an elk, a hart, a rhinoceros, and unicorn, the skull of a man killed by a violent death…

If for no other reason than curiosity the Culpeper’s list, and others about how to make up prescriptions, are worth a read.

The point is that western medicine was no different in concept that that of the orient just a few hundred years ago. In fact the separation was very recent, and is by no means complete.

Western Medicine only began to leap in a different direction after penicillin began to be available for general use.  The first time it was used clinically was in 1938. A few years before that the sulfonamides were developed and specific serums might help fight an infection - as long as the doctors chose the right serum. Before then doctors had to rely on a variety of remedies that owed as much to faith as to science. An interesting take on the changes in our medical practices, by no mean all to the good, is given by Atul Gawander in a New Yorker blog of May 2011.

For the rhino horn issue Members of the South African Game Ranching community are touting another option. This is to legalize the trade.  There is serious discussion in the South African parliament about this matter.

On July 3^rd this year Edna Molewa, South Africa’s Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs told reported that her country “cannot continue to be held hostage by the syndicates slaughtering our rhinos…The establishment of a well-regulated international trade” could help curb rhino poaching, she said.

More on this controversial subject in my next post.

A Lion's False Teeth

Last week I received a copy of an email sent to the Saskatoon Zoo Society, of which I was a member for many years in the 70s and 80s. A 14 year-old boy in Winnipeg explained how he has been told stories by his grandad about a lion. As Zachary wrote it “He used to be a professor of dentistry at the University of Saskatchewan during the 70’s and 80’s. He always used to tell me how you came to him seeking his help to make the world’s first set of dentures for a lion.

That was not quite how I recalled the case, but I have the advantage of a set of photos taken that day and a short article I wrote for the Journal of Zoo Animal Medicine (as it was in those days).

George (the lion) lived in a small enclosure at the Forestry Farm Zoo in Saskatoon. When I arrived in the city from Kenya in 1975 there had not been any sort of veterinary program there and no animals had ever been vaccinated for anything. This is only relevant to George the lion’s situation because he hated me with a passion. After only one injection, given when a keeper fed him some meaty tidbits through the page wire fence, he would not let me near him. He recognized me at a distance, even when I tried to disguise myself. On one occasion he even picked me out in a crowd when I took my family to the zoo and carried my then two-year-old son on my shoulders. He must surely have recognized my face, as my gait and shape would have been markedly altered that day.

So, when the keepers told me that George was off his feed, and had only been toying with the fresh chunks of meat and bone that he had been tempted with over the last couple of days, I knew we had to take action. With some planning we tricked the old lion. I went over to this pen, so of course he promptly headed to the other side, as far away from me as possible. Little did he know it but he was now in range for Stu, one of the team, to use my blowgun and get a drug cocktail into him.

Within a few minutes he was out cold so we could think about entering his pen, but not before checking that Queenie, the lioness with which he spent his days, was safely locked in the shelter. That part was simple, but we still took it very carefully. The first step was to bounce a rock of his backside. No reaction. On closer approach we could poke a long stick at his side. Still no reaction. 

Essential eye protection

 I checked his heart and breathing and then had a look at his mouth. 

Sore mouth, broken teeth. No wonder he was off his feed.

It was easy to see what the problem was. He had three broken canine teeth, the big ones that a lion uses to kill his prey. Two of them had nasty-looking pus-like material oozing out. No wonder he was of his feed. He must have been hurting.

I at once knew that I need some help with this one. By lunchtime I was back in my office at the WesternCollege of Veterinary Medicine and I had had an excited response after my call to the dental college across campus. Two mornings later we were back at the zoo. By we, I mean me and three dentists. This is almost certainly two more dentists than were actually needed, but it is not every day that a chance like this would arise. Indeed one of them has been telling his grandson about the case some thirty-five years later.

Immobilization was much easier this time because the keeper staff had shut Queenie out of the shelter and George was within easy reach for his injection. The dental team soon had a cast made of George’s mouth and promised to get everything done as soon as possible. They began to discuss idea for making up a set of metal crowns. 

A wild lion with a broken tooth, in this case an incisor

We discussed the whys and wherefores of how George had broken his teeth. I had seen broken teeth in wild lions, and had learned that this was sometimes caused by biting at a hard bone, but it is a rare event. In George’s case it was almost certainly due to his biting at the wires around his cage and catching the rear, concave surfaces of his teeth. When he pulled back they got stuck and could break off. Apparently this was a recognized hazard for lions in captivity. 

Our third immobilization, for a much longer procedure, took place a few days later. Again, George was easy to approach in his shelter and the routines were simple.  

Out of the pen, off to the trailer

I checked his heart and breathing, and pretty soon we were carrying him to a waiting flatbed trailer where I administered some eye drops to protect his corneas and we put a towel over his head. From there we shifted a very sleepy lion into the zoo van and headed to the college. Once there another team joined us—the anesthesia team. These were the folks who would have to keep both George and all the people safe for a couple of hours. We did not exactly want him waking up mid-surgery!

Pipe cleaners do have other uses!

At this point I was more-or-less supernumerary. The dentists took over for the root canal procedure, for that is what was needed. Not just on one tooth, but on three. They had come fully prepared. None of their usual delicate instruments was going to be of much use. To clean out the infected tooth roots they used coping saw blades that they had picked up at a hardware store. Flushing the mess out of the root canals was easier. Instead of their normal fine equipment they used large veterinary needles, there was no shortage of those around. To dry everything up they had sterilized a whole bunch of pipe cleaners.

The brand new caps in place on the casts. Perfect fit!

Now came the really clever bit. The dentists had designed stainless steel tooth caps that had no concave surfaces. If George got at the wires again the teeth would simply slip off as he pulled.

With the canals and teeth dry and clean it was simply a case of applying the right sort of cement, albeit in much large quantities than any previous human patient, inserting the pins into the channels and letting everything dry.

Ready to roll! No chewing problems now.

George soon adapted to his new finery. His appetite returned, and he lived on for quite a few more trouble-free years. There was a brief interlude of an idea to rename him Jaws, after the nasty guy played by Richard Dawson Kiel in the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. That did not last.

A display item at the WCVM

George’s skull, with teeth in place, is now a part of the collection of bones and other bits in the WCVM’s anatomy department. The unusual skull appears every now and again on special display days. They were never strictly dentures, as Zachary has been told, but at the time they were indeed the world’s only set of capped lion’s teeth.

A favourite photo from the Serengeti. I did not chekc the teeth too closely, but they looked fine

Rhino Horn: To Ban or Not to Ban the Trade

As readers of this, and other blogs, FB and Twitter posts and the occasional piece of print media are well aware, rhino poaching has continued to escalate, somewhat like a slow tsunami, for the last five or six years. I have posted on this subject thirteen times since 2010.

Most of the increase in annual numbers has taken place in Africa and it is no surprise that the vast Kruger National Park has taken most of the hits. The numbers change from week to week, but it would seem that well over two animals a day are being taken out. The latest figure I have seen, for mid-June, was 428 dead rhino, 267 of them in the Kruger alone. One June 22 a South African National Parks report stated that 25 rhino had been killed in the Limpopo district in one week. 

A Linkedin group flying under the banner of The Wildlife Conservation Society has seen a considerable amount of traffic of late. There has been a lively debate about the pros and cons of lifting the ban of the trade in rhino horn.

There can be no doubt that the policing efforts in many places have not worked, or not worked as well as one might have hoped. These increases have come at substantial cost to governments and park managers. Ranger and military forces have been increased, sometimes by considerable numbers, but the poachers have persisted, and just like in other walks of life the “bad guys” are one step ahead of the forces of law and order. The CITES ban has simply not worked.

The protagonists of an open market and lifting of the ban have quoted scientific article titled A Market Solution For Preserving Biodiversity: The Black Rhino,  prepared in 1999 by Gardner Brown and David Layton.

The article was published in a book titled Protecting Endangered Species in the United States and edited by Jason F. Shogren and John Tschirhart.

The article contains a bunch of mathematical formulas, and maths is definitely not my strong suit. The very opposite. I recall (dimly) something about differential equations, but I have no idea what they do.

Much has changed since that paper was published and some of the assumptions are out of date. The new, and entirely false claim of the horn having cancer-cure properties was a clever marketing tool used by unscrupulous vendors in Vietnam. 

A woman grinding rhino horn in a specially designed bowl

Who could resist such a claim when we know that folks with cancer can be desperate for any sort of solution.  On top of that came the ridiculous claim that the stuff is a cure-all for hangovers, which led it to become a “fashion” tonic for the newly rich and upwardly mobile in Vietnam. Not bad for an overgrown fingernail!

On the price side, the Vietnamese marketing has driven the price to something close to double that of gold. Wow, my fingernails are not worth that much.

While many poachers have been killed and even more arrested, the carnage continues and the rangers are at constant risk. That they are willing to run that risk, the loss of their own lives, speaks volumes for them, and it is even sadder to realize that rangers, senior park and wildlife officials and military forces in some countries have been implicated in the poaching, rather than the efforts to stop it. For me personally, the saddest example of this lies in the country of my birth where, it is reported, that over 30 senior staff of the Kenya Wildlife Service have been suspended over allegations of complicity in poaching.

Thousands of words have been exchanged on the issue. Those who wish to see the ban lifted seem to come from the very considerable number of South African game ranchers who have successfully, and at no trivial cost, successfully bred rhinos on their properties. Nobody has provided actual numbers, but the ranchers obviously see the potential of the sale of horn into the oriental (mainly Vietnamese) market as being no different than the sale of any other commodity derived from a business venture. The only other sources of income for these ranchers are through tourism or livestock auctions. For those who wonder about the latter, they have been an integral part of the South African game ranch industry for at least twenty years. Ranchers have become expert at rounding up and transporting just about any species that one can ranch.

Among the arguments in favour of the legalization of trade one correspondent suggests that poachers could be taught to breed rhinos and harvest the horn every two years or so. The horn of a white rhino (the commonest species) grows at about 0.9 kg per year and at prices in the $60,000 per kg range that would mean a substantial income from just a few animals. The writer makes the point that the communities that engage in this enterprise would guard their assets with their lives.

Those who are against any form of legalization of the rhino horn trade point to the disastrous results of the lifting of the ivory ban by CITES. Nobody (except perhaps those who work within CITES) thinks that the partial lifting of the ban in 1997 has been anything but an utter catastrophe for elephants.  There is a lot of traffic on Internet sites about this mess, and Wikipedia has an interesting look at the long history  of this subject, but I’m trying to focus on the rhino issue here.

There have been some changes in the law and penalties for those who are caught poaching. The Kenya government recently changed their laws so that those found guilty might be fined up to $120,00 and prison terms of up to 15 years. This was quite a change form the previous fine of $480.

Harsh penalties for offenders may help a little, but only a little. The real culprits either live in Vietnam or are middle-men in Africa who make the real profits. They would never risk the actual poaching, which involves killing, hard work blood and so on.  They are the ones who need to be targeted. Of course some of them work inside the various wildlife agencies and park systems, or in the military. They will be much harder to catch, but if not caught the carnage will continue. The actual poacher on the ground may be a man who earns a few dollars a day and is trying to support a family. He may be desperate. If he has killed a few rhino (or elephants) he may have upped his social status a bit, and will therefore be even keener to be involved.

Elephant and rhino poaching update

If the reports are accurate hundreds or rhino and thousands of elephants have been poached this year, never mind the numbers from previous years. It has become difficult to keep up with the amount of traffic about rhino and elephant poaching on various social media sites and in on-line newspapers. On the one hand there are the announcements about famous people who have come out in support of anti-poaching efforts.

They include a United Nations story that China’s top film star, Li Bingbing has stepped up in support of her countryman Yao Ming. To assist in these efforts the Chinese media have been asked to back the war on poaching  Of course these two are trying to influence things that take place in the world’s major consuming country, where stunningly beautiful ivory carvings have been created for centuries and where an increasingly affluent and growing middle class can afford to make expensive purchases.

A YouTube video featuring Vietnamese singer My Linh is an attempt to raise awareness of the ‘Say NO to rhino horn” in her country.

The Secretary General of the United Nations has come out with a strongly worded statement calling poaching a “grave menace.” 

A MailOnline article about Prince Charles and Prince William has a strong personal link for me.

Most folks are aware that William proposed to his wife Katherine in Kenya. Many know that the actual words were spoken high on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya under the shadow of a flat-topped minor peak named Rutundu at an altitude of 3311 metres (about 10,200 feet). We used to be able to see Rutundu from our living room window and I once walked up to the table lands on the shoulders of the mountain to the nearby at Lake Alice at the foot of a sister flat peak called Ithanguni.

image from

 bks.beyondkenyasafaris.com

But this was before the days when the lakes were stocked with trout by a wealthy Scadinavian who flew them in by helicopter. Nowadays the site has become an upmarket tourist destination and has rustic log cabins for guests.

Bald and one tooth missing at right. Rugby days with Mt. Kenya!

I have an even stronger link to this story as the Royal couple had been staying with a mutual friend Ian Craig at his home on Lewa Downs, which was one of my client cattle ranches for the best part of ten years. In those days Ian’s parents David and Delia ran the ranch and Ian played alongside me in pale blue strip of the Mt. Kenya rugby club as a hard-hitting open side wing forward.

Since then the ranch has become a major wildlife conservancy and is home to many rhino as well as other species, including the Grevy's zebra, which is another endagnered species.

 

Grevy's (at right) and Burchell's zebra near Lewa. Photo by Dick Neal.

Sadly the rhino there are being targeted and a recent report told of the coordinated killing of four animals on a full moon night at Lewa and three other well-known parks. 

Although these famous folk, like many of us around the world are horrified by the destruction of these iconic creatures I do wonder if the high profile and greatly increased attention is not driving the other side of the equation. If anti-poaching efforts are gaining momentum, are the bad guys grabbing what they can before the effort becomes too risky? There has been a continued increase in the rate of rhino poaching. The latest figures state that 381 have been taken in 154 days. On that trajectory the numbers for 2013 will exceed the 688 of 2012.

Two US businessmen (Vinh Chung “Jimmy” Kha and Felix Kha) were recently jailed and fined for trafficking in rhino horn.     

Of course, as I have suggested before, the poaching for a commodity (I choose the word deliberately as that is what some see it as) is not a one-sided story. A recent FB post suggests that trading in LEGAL horn derived from one of the many South African game ranches should be allowed. Johan Kurver has argued that the cost of preventing and policing poaching makes no sense when ranched rhino could provide a good income and tax base. You can follow the rhino conversation on Facebook.

Two more stories (among many) about the twin threats. The Kenya parliament has just passed an emergency bill upping the punishment for wildlife trafficking by a huge amount. Previous fines might have been as much as USD 480, a tiny proportion of the value of a single rhino horn and no sort of deterrent. Now fines may be as much as $120,000 with a 15-year jail term as well. The most striking thing about this amendment is that the vote was not unanimous. There was one quiet “nay” but nobody seems to have reported who made that call. Was that parliamentarian somehow involved in the illegal trade?

The Kenya cabinet were reacting to a country-wide upsurge in publicity that included protest marches and a well managed campaign led by people like Paula Kahumbu, who has been very active in blogs, on Facebook and Twitter on this issue.

Even a very young elephant has some ivory

On the other side it would seem that in Tanzania some thing different and ugly is taking place. Some reports claim that about 10,000 elephants a year are being poached (yes, ten thousand). Of course this form or poaching is indiscriminate. Entire families are being taken out, adults, infants and everything in between. It seems that high-placed officials and even the military are implicated. David Smith, writing on the economicsof the wildlife trade states that “More than a third of all elephant tusks seized by law enforcement last year came from Tanzania, with neighbouring Kenya a close second.” This is particularly striking in light of the interview with a senior Tanzanian minister carried out by Aidan Hartley  The minister claimed no knowledge of the problem. There can only be one of two explanations for his words, neither of them pretty. Incompetence or Collusion.

Bushmeat in Canada

-->

The April 22 issue of Maclean’s magazine carried a story by reporter Sarah Elton about bushmeat. I don’t know if she also came up with the title, Gorillas in our midst but it was a nice pun on the Diane Fossey book title and subsequent movie Gorillas in theMist. 

A similar article titled Monkeys on the menu  appeared in the April 15 on-line version of the magazine

A roadside bushmeat vendor in Cameroon. He\is just trying to make a living

It was good to see this important issue highlighted, but as someone who has witnessed the bushmeat trade first-hand and written about it in some detail I found that there were some missing elements that should have been covered.  I wrote the following letter to the magazine’s editor and in due course received a reply telling me that it had been forwarded to Ms Elton.

Of course I had the luxury, in my book The Trouble With Lions (U of Alberta Press 2008) of being able to explore the subject outside the restrictions of the kind of word limit required in a magazine article, but I believe that the disease issues I raised are important.

Here is the letter, unedited from what I sent, but with two of my own pictures slotted in at appropriate spots, as I cannot use the ones from the magazine.

Dear Mr. Stevenson,

Sarah Elton’s story on bushmeat, with its clever punning title Gorilla in our midst is, like the curate’s egg of Punch cartoon fame, good in parts. She misses a few really important points. I have worked in Africa for many years and also written books and blogs on the continent’s wildlife. I have three chapters in my book The Trouble With Lions that cover this subject in some detail. The third one is titled Bushmeat and Bureaucrats. Like the members of this corps worldwide it seems that Canadian ones are slow to act.

I realize that Elton was constrained by a word limit, but the Photoshopped image of the gorilla head on the meat counter made a nice point and was perhaps a worthy replacement for the 1000 extra words the article needed. She has however either missed out on or is misinformed about disease risks.

Foot and mouth disease is endemic in much of Africa and all cloven-hoofed species are susceptible. Canada’s last outbreak of this economically disastrous plague occurred in Saskatchewan in 1952. It was traced back to the importation of smoked meat from Poland. Bushmeat from Africa poses at least as great a risk.

Monkey pox is misnamed (not Elton’s fault). It is a disease of rodents – remember the outbreak in the USA that was linked to pet gophers in 2003. People in Africa, desperate for protein are eating species once considered taboo. The Wakamba of Kenya, a tribe famed as hunters, are amongst them.

Egyption fruit bats in a cave in Queen Elizabeth NP in Uganda

Fruit bats, a common bushmeat item, carry Ebola and the closely related Marburg virus. Both are deadly to humans. For several years I took senior veterinary students to Uganda and a highlight was a visit to a cave in Queen Elizabeth National Park that was the daytime home to an estimated 100,000 bats. That stopped after an unfortunate Dutch woman who had visited the cave contracted Marburg and died at home in Holland. The cave is now off-limits to all.

AIDS is a disease that crossed from primates into humans at least seven times in the 20^th century. There are two main virus types, HIV1 and HIV2. 

A chimp feeding on fruit in Uganda

Beatrice Hahn, a professor at the University of Alabama showed that chimpanzees are the source of HIV1 while sooty mangabeys, a small almost uniformly grey monkey from West Africa are the source of HIV2. Even more fascinating is that the two viruses in humans are less closely related to one another than they are to their original primate hosts.

I realize that in this little précis I have exceeded the 300-word limit, but I do have lots of other examples and I also quoted Dr. Brashares in my book. I also have good pictures of those fruit bats and of a local bushmeat vendor with whom I had a couple of long chats. He is from rural Cameroon and is just trying to make a living in a forest region where livestock cannot be raised.

Yours sincerely

Jerry Haigh BVMS, MSc, FRCVS

I signed off using my Professor Emeritus status in the hope that I would be taken seriously. I just hope that foot-and-mouth disease does not get into Canada, or indeed North America, through the bushmeat route. This is a real case of my not wanting to be an accurate prophet. 

I have not heard another word, either from the magazine or the author.  Ah well!