Eating Apes

Rating:
Summary: Very powerful
Review: A dead-ahead approach to a difficult subject that most people would prefer to avoid. Powerful writing, clear and personable. Has made me look at the entire meat trade in a new light. Profoundly affecting.

I recommend this book highly to everyone. We have for a long time avoided looking at what has now become an urgent issue.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful challenge to wildlife conserv groups, loggers, more
Review: American and international conservation organizations may be doing little more than feel-good guilt assuaging with many of their slick magazine glossy photos, while ignoring a huge elephant right in front of the world's faces and refusing to show readers the problem.

So says Peterson in the challenging and disturbing book Eating Apes.

Peterson writes about the hunting for bushmeat in Central Africa, specifically hunting great apes - gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos. He accuses the Wildlife Conservation Society of doing little more than giving PR flak to a German logging concern in the Congo, CIB, a decade ago, just at the time public pressure was starting to ratchet up on the issue, in large part due to photographer Karl Ammann.

He also accuses Wildlife Conservation, the magazine of WCS, along with National Geographic and other such magazines and other media for generally downplaying or even spiking the issue. Ammann, as interviewed in the book, is even blunter, noting how several wildlife conservation magazines said they didn't want his pictures specifically because they were too controversial and, in not so many words, too guilt-provoking while showing that the modern western-nation wildlife preservation industry wasn't wearing any clothes on this issue.

Read Eating Apes. Then rethink your donations to wildlife groups, at least without some strong letters to the editor.


Rating:
Summary: Killing the real sasquatch
Review: As a primatology student, I am often asked by friends, with a hopeful look in their eyes, if I believe in the existence of Bigfoot, a giant ape dwelling in the forests of the American Northwest. I hate to do it, but I always have to rain on the parade and say there is no compelling evidence for such a creature. I then explain to them that there actually is a Bigfoot, and a Littlefoot as well, living today, but they do not live in America. My friends get excited and ask me where...but their interest rapidly diminishes when I tell them they are the great apes of Africa and Southeast Asia: the gorilla (Bigfoot) and the chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans (Littlefeet). These are beings with self awareness and complex social lives who use tools, eat medicinal plants and pass their traditions down from generation to generation. I feel that we are dulled by familiarity into not realizing how very lucky we are that these amazing, sentient cousins of ours still share the world with us in their tropical strongholds...and hence are not doing what we ought to to prevent their ongoing slaughter. If the current administration proposed clear-cutting the forest in which the (mythical) Sasquatch lived, I have no doubt that thousands of people woud rush to that forest and chain themselves to trees, do whatever it took, to save them. And yet the great apes are being eliminated with nary a hand raised in protest. "Eating Apes" describes with shocking clarity the astonishing failure of the conservation community to mobilize the world to save our closest cousins. The message of the impassioned text, backed up by Karl Ammann's brutally riveting photographs, is: enough of the feel-good "win some small battles while losing the war (but publicize the hell out of the small wins)" mentality. Action is called for, and now. Anyone who has ever been enchanted by the grandeur of African wild places and the Bigfoots and Littlefoots who live in them should read this book now. Time is running out.

Rating:
Summary: Conservation's biggest failure exposed
Review: Dale Peterson and Karl Ammann lay out the history of the commercial hunting of apes (and other species) that is driving chimps, gorillas, and bonobos rapidly towards extinction, and the direct link with the logging taking place within Central African forests. It's not surprising that logging companies don't give a hoot if our closest relatives are hunted to extinction, but what is shocking is Peterson's and Ammann's exposure of the inaction and lack of concern shown by major conservation groups, and the even more troubling partnerships between loggers and conservation groups that have enabled loggers to continue destroying the forests and the wildlife that live there. Anyone who cares about wildlife, great apes or otherwise, and donates to major conservation organizations must read this book before writing another check. Ammann, the photographer who has campaigned for nearly a decade to bring the bushmeat crisis to the world's attention, writes a compelling afterword, and provides disturbing photographs of murdered apes. My only complaints are that there were not more of Ammann's photographs included in the book, and that the indictments of major conservation groups were perhaps not scathing enough.

Rating:
Summary: Eating Kin
Review: Eating Apes is well written in a comfortable style. This excellent and easy to read style is contrasted with the disturbing facts it presents of the ongoing genocides motivated by western civilizations penchant for greed and power. When you consider that indigenous human peoples of Africa have shared the forests with our fellow apes for thousands of years without destroying each other it is easy to determine who is responsible for this disaster. Consider the fact that our western civilization has yet to come across a people (ape or otherwise) who have lived in harmony with nature who we have not destroyed. This book chronicles the latest such destruction with regard to chimpanzees, gorillas and the human forest foragers as well as the forest in which they live. Peterson and Amman's book is a bold and brave j'accuse of the logging and conservation organizations who are spearheading this latest attack. You must read this book. And then you must follow the advice of Peterson and Amman as to what you can do to help stop it. Finally, you must act now, because there is very little time left for our kin in the forests.

Rating:
Summary: Eating Kin
Review: Eating Apes is well written in a comfortable style. This excellent and easy to read style is contrasted with the disturbing facts it presents of the ongoing genocides motivated by western civilizations penchant for greed and power. When you consider that indigenous human peoples of Africa have shared the forests with our fellow apes for thousands of years without destroying each other it is easy to determine who is responsible for this disaster. Consider the fact that our western civilization has yet to come across a people (ape or otherwise) who have lived in harmony with nature who we have not destroyed. This book chronicles the latest such destruction with regard to chimpanzees, gorillas and the human forest foragers as well as the forest in which they live. Peterson and Amman's book is a bold and brave j'accuse of the logging and conservation organizations who are spearheading this latest attack. You must read this book. And then you must follow the advice of Peterson and Amman as to what you can do to help stop it. Finally, you must act now, because there is very little time left for our kin in the forests.

Rating:
Summary: look at the pictures
Review: Everyone should check out this book to at least look at the pictures. They are quite moving, especially of the babies.

But people moved by these pictures should see similar pictures of chickens, cows, turkeys and pigs. These pictures are easy to find, and what happens to these apes happens to these other animals at billions of times greater frequency and for equally trivial reasons. And this is at the hands of Americans, not Africans, and mostly people who wouldn't dream of eating apes.

Rating:
Summary: look at the pictures
Review: Everyone should check out this book to at least look at the pictures. They are quite moving, especially of the babies.

But people moved by these pictures should see similar pictures of chickens, cows, turkeys and pigs. These pictures are easy to find, and what happens to these apes happens to these other animals at billions of times greater frequency and for equally trivial reasons. And this is at the hands of Americans, not Africans, and mostly people who wouldn't dream of eating apes.

Rating:
Summary: exposing Feel Good Conservation
Review: I am a biased reviewer, as I have for many years been debating folks on the CITES list and promoting Karl Ammann's articles on that and other lists. Still, I found their book very nuanced, polite and hard hitting. It covers all the angles dispassionately without singling out any one source for blame regarding the demise of Africa's biodiversity.

The area that interests me in my own research is the problem of Feel Good Conservation, and the idea that you can just write a check to your favorite nature organization and all will be well. It is now well documented that a number of mainstream environmental organizations such as WWF are in bed with the industries they claim to be monitoring. The conflicts of interest go beyond absurdity, these guys (mainstream enviros) will be praising their own efforts and accepting donations (from whoever, the bushmeat hunter lobby group?) up until the last tree is cut from the Earth (ie., the Easter Island phenomenon).

Other books that deal with this issue are Mark Dowie's classic, Losing Ground (1996) and a must read from Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The mask of pluralism (2003), which shows how almost all social and environmental movements (even so-called radicals) are controlled or manipulated to some extent from above by foundation money such as from the Ford Foundation (aka, CIA).

Saving Africa's environment and wildlife will take more than writing checks to corrupt "nature" organizations who suck up donations from some of the worst environmental offenders in the world. These organizations offer a convenient cover for continued imperial plundering. More complicated rules and treaties are introduced through CITES (where in Central Africa it is ineffective because it's rules are inappropriate in a region where government barely exists) when what is really called for is simple steps toward local democracy in the world's environmental hotspot locations: Central Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia. But this cannot be since the United States backs bloody dictators and autocrats in these areas. Rule No. 1: The greed of the rich and powerful must be met at all costs. Rule No 2: Feel Good Conservation and other liberal gestures can be tolerated and even funded, as long as they don't infringe upon Rule No 1.

There are worthwhile groups to support who have some of these issues sussed out...P>Thank you,

Richard Wilcox, Tokyo

Rating:
Summary: Finally--the African bushmeat crisis explained
Review: I have been seeing references to the African trade in wild meat, including primates, for a couple of years now--Jane Goodall mentions it in her talks--but searched unsuccessfully for an intelligent guide to the issue. Now it's here, and it's clear that this subject is urgent, appalling, and very very complex. Dale Peterson's gift is to explain the crisis in accessible terms, dispassionately (though the problem arouses passions across the political spectrum), with a wealth of information, and in a lucid, utterly compelling manner. With Karl Ammann, who took the riveting photgraphs, Peterson has visited the meat markets where ape meat is sold as exotic--not subsistence--food, tracked the loggers whose commercial enterprises have opened up the forests to hunters on a scale heretofore unimagined and completely unsustainable, and walked into hunting camps and interviewed the hunters themselves. The story of one of these men, Joseph Melloh, gives the book a human face and a narrative frame; one of the most powerful effects of this study of cultural and political conflict is that it reads like a novel, with this man at its heart, and we see the issues through African eyes--no First World condescension to Third World problems. The book also shows the full range of the catastrophe--environmental, economic, political, social, and ethical--while at the same time showing how readers can make a difference through a few simple steps, by working to change public opinion and shift economic goals. The great apes are humans' closest relatives, and we are destroying them. This book faces a crisis that most people are hardly aware of, and explains it in a way that makes change thinkable and possible. ...