Sharon Begley
|
Aug 4, 2008 09:00 AM
What difference does eight dead gorillas make? As Newsweek reported exactly a year ago,
when poachers slaughtered eight of the world’s last remaining mountain
gorillas—including in Congo's supposedly protected Virunga National
Park—it cruelly highlighted a threat that conservationists thought was
behind them: illegal hunting. It did something else, too. Scientists
had been considering reclassifying the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei)
from critically endangered to endangered. But the brutal killings
underscored just how fragile even the best-intentioned
wildlife-conservation efforts are, and the mountain gorilla therefore
remains critically endangered. (Click here to see a gallery of the world's vanishing primates.) For at least two decades the
dogma in the conservation world had been that habitat destruction, not
hunting, posed the gravest threat to the world’s rare animals. But the
slaughter in the jungle was just the most notorious wake-up call that
poaching was back, and in a way that threatened to send an unknown
number of species into extinction. After the murders of the Congo
gorillas, scientists realized that the proposed reclassification would
be premature: mountain gorillas are still critically endangered and,
according to the first comprehensive review in five years of the
world’s primates, they are not alone. Monkeys, apes and other primates
are disappearing from the face of the Earth. And as with Congo’s
gorillas, a key cause is hunting. Our cousins are being eaten into
extinction.
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