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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Disturbing And Essential Book, July 19, 2003
This review is from: Eating Apes (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Hardcover)
What animals we eat are selected by what culture we grow up in. Distant societies think nothing of eating dogs. Some closer ones think eating horse is completely acceptable. Then there are frogs, snakes, and insect larvae. It is all a matter of getting enough protein. One man's protein is another man's atrocity. Americans are used to eating meat they find in Styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic, but the indigenous peoples of central Africa have always eaten the animals living around them: elephants, antelopes, porcupines, rodents, and so on. They don't mind a stew of gorilla or a chimp's sirloin, and what of it? It's the way they have always done things. Tribal languages, in fact, often use the same word for wild animal as they do for meat. The world, however, is not the way it always was, and a shocking book, _Eating Apes_ (University of California Press) by Dale Peterson, shows that apes on the menu is not something the world ought to continue to accept. We ourselves are members of the tribe of great apes; chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are on the branch with us. But if African tribes don't share our scientific view or our squeamishness, traditional hunters, in predation balance over the centuries, surely are not going to do lasting harm. Traditional hunting, however, is no longer traditional. There has been an invasion from outside the continent by logging companies, making huge profits from our demand for hardwoods. The companies have lots of workers, many of them from the region, and all the workers have to be fed. Hunters, many of whom are also from the region, are hired to bring in the protein. Bows, arrows, and nets have given way to the far more efficient and deadly wire snares and automatic rifles and shotguns. Perhaps if greater firepower were the only threat to our primate cousins, they could still make it. But we are destroying their habitat (again, mostly by logging), and primates will suffer before other species because of their slow rate of reproduction. There are plenty of species headed toward extinction, but few because we are eating them, and none so close to us evolutionarily. In addition, butchering the apes may be the way humans got HIV and Ebola viruses. It may well be that you haven't heard of the problem of eating apes into extinction because the conservation organizations are keeping quiet about such a downer of a message, and because they are, believe it or not, in partnership with the loggers. What will be needed is the courage to challenge cultural convictions. It is possible for the West to value (or at least claim to value) sensitivity to other cultures, but in the case of eating apes, it will have to impose scientific knowledge of close kinship, risk of disease, and impending loss of primates to get the native cultures to change. It may even be possible within the corporate culture, which mines habitats to get at profits, to insist not just on sustainable development (a nebulous idea the logging companies pay lip service to) but to take on a wider view of environmental improvement. You can figure up the odds of occurrence of these cultural changes, and especially if you look at our past record, you will not be optimistic. Peterson includes an appendix of what you, and what conservation organizations, can do; he obviously is not giving up hope. Perhaps it is a sign of hope that his reasonable and dispassionate account of this disaster will start many people thinking about the previously covert problem of the loss of the apes. Nevertheless, this is a profoundly disturbing and sad book, and will not be forgotten by those who can get through it.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally--the African bushmeat crisis explained, May 28, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Eating Apes (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Hardcover)
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. ...
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Killing the real sasquatch, July 4, 2003
This review is from: Eating Apes (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Hardcover)
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.
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