Apes Are Endangered, Exotic--and For Sale

Milk bottles at the ready, Irene Okon Edem cradles two wide-eyed orphans in her arms while a third hangs precociously on her neck.

“Stop it,” the 23-year-old Nigerian gently scolds one of them, named Buster, who then bites his lip and tugs her hair mischievously.

Buster is a chimpanzee, delivered in April to Edem and fellow workers at the Drill Ranch, a private American-run primate sanctuary in Nigeria, which conservationists say is one of the world’s most flagrant illegal markets for Africa’s endangered apes.

A woman had bought Buster out of pity, rescuing the baby chimp from smugglers. Other primates have turned up at the Drill Ranch in the eastern Nigeria city of Calabar with cigarette burns or shotgun wounds.

Looking for an illegal, exotic pet? Go no farther than the Musa Yar A’Adua Center, a marble memorial in the capital to honor a past junta figure.

Animal traders set up shop in a scrubby field across the street. Affluent customers choose among endangered apes and other animals captured in the wild, seeking trophies for public and private zoos worldwide.

Young men watch over dirty cages and nylon mesh bags filled with some of the world’s most threatened species -- fish eagles, for instance, or gray parrots, prized as good talkers.

Got any apes? A trader named Habib Sani pulls an emaciated baby chimpanzee out of a perforated plastic sack. The price: 60,000 naira, or about $500.

Unaccustomed to bright sunlight, the baby chimp shields its eyes with tiny hands.

Even gorillas, which number just 100 in a forest fringe on Nigeria’s eastern border, can be ordered for the right price, whispers Sani.

In Nigeria, a West African nation of 120 million, decades of intensive hunting have denuded forests and savannas of wildlife. But its cities remain marketplaces for exotic species, alive or dead, from nearby Cameroon, Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Central African Republic. Conservationists say commercial trapping in those countries is an offshoot of the more traditional, and more indiscriminate, trade in hunted meat.

At the Lekki tourist market in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, an American businessman gazes at Sahara Desert foxes, cranes and parrots pawing and scratching at their plywood cages. “An Old McDonald’s farm,” he mutters.

Live apes and rare birds are sometimes seen on sale just outside Nigeria’s international airports.

Great apes, humans’ closest animal relatives, once ranged from Senegal on Africa’s western tip to Tanzania in the east.

They survive today only in isolated pockets of dwindling forests -- perhaps just 100,000 chimpanzees and far fewer gorillas, scientists estimate.

Hunting or trapping great apes is banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a global treaty that Nigeria has signed.

But the accord hasn’t stopped trafficking networks from capturing chimpanzees, bonobos and their giant cousins, African gorillas, and smuggling them through borders and airports to zoos and private collectors overseas.

Most takers are in Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe, says Shirley McGreal, chairwoman of the Summerville, S.C.-based International Primate Protection League.

McGreal showed Associated Press a letter from a Nigerian firm offering to sell four baby gorillas for $400,000 each to a private Middle Eastern zoo. The league whited out the zoo’s name for legal reasons.

The profits from smuggling are huge. A chimp sold for $10 in an African village would fetch $20,000 in Moscow or Dubai. Nigeria is a key transit point, conservationists say, because officials here often plead ignorance of bans or deliberately overlook violations.

“We often have to show police and officials photocopies of laws,” says Muhtari Aminu-Kanu, executive director of the Nigeria Conservation Foundation. “Once they have seen that, they are usually helpful.”

The plight of Africa’s primates gained prominence in September when a baby gorilla and baby chimpanzee arrived at Cairo’s airport on a flight from Nigeria without proper export and import documents.

Egyptian veterinarians drowned them in a vat of chemicals, saying they feared they were carrying diseases.

In January, conservationists were alerted when four baby gorillas from Nigeria turned up at Malaysia’s Taiping Zoo.

The government-funded zoo denied any impropriety, saying it was told the apes were bred in captivity in Nigeria and therefore could be legally traded.

Conservationists say there is no known breeding program in all of Africa from which gorillas could have come.

Export documents seen by AP list the gorillas as having been bred at Nigeria’s University of Ibadan Zoological Gardens, 75 miles north of Lagos. Employees there say they have no breeding program. The only gorilla on display is a 37-year-old female long past breeding age.

Olalekan Akanji, a keeper at the Ibadan zoo, said the four gorillas now in Malaysia “came from the jungle in Cameroon” and spent several months at his zoo. Akanji said he bottle-fed them milk and sugar water, and even taught one to ride a tricycle.

Another zoo employee, Friday Ndubisi Onwuka, gave a similar account.

Asked whether the zoo ever had other baby gorillas intended for trade, Akanji said, “Yes, there have been many. But a lot of them died.”

“If anyone else wants more gorillas, we can get some more,” Akanji volunteered. “But they are very expensive.”

The zoo administration said the director was not available for comment.

Export documents for two of the infant gorillas -- named Abbey and Alice -- bear the signature of the permanent secretary of Nigeria’s Ministry of Environment, D.B. Usman.

Usman did not return messages seeking comment.

Nigeria’s environment minister, Muhammad Sa’id, says officials are investigating the possibility that the gorillas’ export documents may have been forged. He blames rampant wildlife smuggling on the “activities of some unpatriotic Nigerians and their foreign conspirators.”

McGreal, of the International Primate Protection League, contends the gorillas “could not legitimately have been captive-bred.” Nigerian conservationists agree.

Smugglers often buy primates from hunters, who shoot the adults for food and profit and capture the surviving infants, said John Oates, a British-born primatologist living part-time in Nigeria.

Anthony E. Bassey, a Nigeria Conservation Foundation official, says modern wire snares and traps have replaced traditional hunting methods and have worsened the odds against endangered primates.

The loss of habitat through road-building and logging has further depleted their numbers.

“Our primates need better protection, but how?” Bassey asked. “It’s a race against time.”

In the decade since he was orphaned at 15 and forced to quit school and fend for himself, Edet Asuquo Edet has hunted in the rain forests surrounding Oban, a town near Nigeria’s eastern border with Cameroon.

Once, the pickings were plenty, Edet says, but these days it can take days or weeks to find a few small monkeys or bush rats to sell as food to tribespeople.

Edet says he almost never sees gorillas these days. Occasionally, he bags a rarity -- a chimpanzee.

In April, he shot a male nsimbo, or drill -- a majestic pink-and-red animal, baboon-sized and listed among the international trade convention’s endangered species.

Although he insists he never does it himself, Edet says he knows hunters who have captured the live young of adult animals they have killed and sold them to traders who whisk them off to the cities.

“We know the monkeys only to eat, but some people like to keep the little ones because they live like human beings,” Edet explained.

At the Drill Ranch, run by Liza Gadsby and Peter Jenkins, from Portland, Ore., keeper Okon Edem believes the only hope is to educate Africa’s youngsters about the apes’ value as “ecological treasures.” So she is especially keen to get the message out to a party of visiting schoolchildren who watch in fascination as the three baby chimps climb over her.

“Some people say it should be acceptable in Nigeria to hunt these animals to eat or sell, but that was in the past,” Edem tells them. “Now they are disappearing into extinction.”

She admits it is hard to persuade poor people to “love monkeys when they see orphaned children not getting any care.”

Bassey, the Nigerian conservation official, says folk tales of hunters battling chimpanzees with makeshift swords have fostered a perception among villagers that primates are “the enemy of humanity.”

However, Bassey says, even some hunters change their minds when they see drills or chimpanzees nursing their young, and vow never to hunt the animals again.

“When you see chimp babies at their mothers’ breasts, you relate to them as social beings,” he says. “Wildlife is not just about jungle life.”

*

On the Net:

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species:

www.cites.org

U.N. Environment Program’s Great Apes Survival Project: www.unep.org/grasp