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 Dale Peterson, author of 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 The New York Times 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.
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