| Subject: Tastes just lke chicken, I'm told. |
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Date Posted: 17:32:08 01/19/07 Fri
In reply to:
DE
's message, "Just a livin off the land..." on 14:11:11 01/18/07 Thu
>or AK Buffet:
>
>Congo Rebels Said to Kill, Eat Gorillas
>January 18, 2007 — By Todd Pitman, Associated Press
>
>DAKAR, Senegal -- Rebels in eastern Congo have killed
>and eaten two silverback mountain gorillas,
>conservationists said Wednesday, warning they fear
>more of the endangered animals may have been
>slaughtered in the lawless region.
>
>Only about 700 mountain gorillas remain in the world,
>380 of them spread across a range of volcanic
>mountains straddling the borders of Congo, Rwanda and
>Uganda in Central Africa.
>
>One dismembered gorilla corpse was found Tuesday in a
>pit latrine in Congo's Virunga National Park, a few
>hundred yards from a park patrol post that was
>abandoned because of rebel attacks, according to the
>London-based Africa Conservation Fund. Another was
>killed in the same area on Jan. 5, said the group,
>which based its report on conservationists in the
>field.
>
>The group blamed rebels loyal to a local warlord,
>Laurent Nkunda, for the latest killing. Nkunda is a
>renegade soldier who commands thousands of fighters in
>the vast country's east who have in recent years
>assaulted cities and clashed sporadically with
>government forces.
>
>Silverbacks are older adult males and usually group
>leaders, though some are loners.
>
>Paulin Ngobobo, a senior park warden, wrote an
>Internet blog about finding the latest remains.
>
>"We've learned a lot: the gorilla had in fact been
>eaten for meat. His name was Karema, another solitary
>silverback that had been born into a habituated group
>-- meaning that he had grown to trust humans enough to
>let them come to within touching distance," Ngobobo
>wrote.
>
>"We learned that the remaining gorillas are extremely
>vulnerable -- the rebels are after the meat, and it's
>not difficult for them to find and kill the few
>gorillas that remain."
>
>Ngobobo said the first gorilla reported killed had
>been shot by rebels and eaten.
>
>"A local farmer was ordered to help the rebels collect
>the meat of the gorilla," Ngobobo said. "He told them
>that the meat was dangerous to eat, and immediately
>informed us."
>
>Robert Muir of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, who
>accompanied Ngobobo, said: "We need to impress on
>Nkunda and his men that it is inexcusable to destroy
>national and world heritage of such critical
>importance. ... Now that we know that the slaughtered
>gorilla was eaten, the gorillas habituated for tourism
>are at extreme risk -- and we are worried that more
>have been killed already."
>
>The last remaining hippo populations in Congo are in
>Virunga and are also on the verge of being wiped out.
>Conservationists have blamed rebels and militias for
>slaughtering them, and say more than 400 were killed
>last year, mostly for food. Only 900 hippos remain, a
>huge drop from the 22,000 reported there in 1998.
>
>Virunga park has been ravaged by poachers and
>deforestation for more than a decade. The 1994 Rwandan
>genocide saw millions of refugees spill into Congo,
>marking the beginning of an era of unrest, lawlessness
>and clashes between militias and rebel groups.
>
>Mineral-rich Congo, which held its first democratic
>elections in more than four decades last year, is
>struggling to recover from a 1998-2002 war that drew
>in the armies of more than half a dozen African
>nations.
>
>The job of protecting the country's parks falls on
>local rangers, and the risks are high. In Virunga
>alone, some 97 rangers have died on duty since 1996,
>the Africa Conservation Fund said.
>
>On his blog, Ngobobo also described being shot at and
>beaten by the military, who he and other rangers were
>trying to persuade to stop cutting down the forest.
>
>Richard Leakey, a conservationist credited with
>helping end the slaughter of elephants in Kenya during
>the 1980s, said: "The survival of these last remaining
>mountain gorillas should be one of humanity's greatest
>priorities. Their future lies with a small number of
>very brave rangers risking their lives with very
>little support from the outside world."
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