Archive for December 15th, 2006
Forests disappearing at a rapid pace in the Congo River Basin
Fifty years is all it would take to destroy two-thirds of the forests in the Congo River Basin. Currently, about 3.7 million acres of forest each year is lost to logging, agriculture, and road development (among other things). In a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report, Laurent Somé, WWF’s Central African Regional Office Director, briefly touches on some of the problems associated with deforestation:
“Tropical forest is vanishing at a rate of 5 percent a decade, wrecking habitats and releasing 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is a fifth of global greenhouse emissions.”
The WWF report further elaborates:
“The region is blanketed by a patchwork quilt of logging concessions. While the logging itself is usually selective and does little damage, the associated roads, infrastructure and migration degrade surrounding landscape and result in massive wildlife depletion.”
Recent posts have raised the important issue that deforestation and habitat destruction are contributing to the spread of Ebola — in which the importance of forests could not be clearer. The WWF and other organizations (like the Wildlife Conservation Society) are working to promote awareness of this severe situation in hopes of saving the land and its inhabitants. Reuters UK reports that the WWF, which in the past two decades has protected millions of acres, is in the process of gaining 300,000 more protected acres in the next few months.
Are Rwanda’s Mountain Gorillas safe from Ebola?
About six days ago, I shared with y’all some horrific news that 5,000 or so gorillas have lost their lives to Ebola.
For me it has been a hard number to grasp. But, some bittersweet news is coming out of Rwanda about how mountain gorillas are too isolated to contract the disease… for now. The news article that reported this, “Rwanda: ‘Gorillas Safe From Ebola‘,” writes,
“Mountain gorillas in Virunga Park do not face a threat from Ebola, a senior official with Rwanda Office of Tourism and National Parks (ORTPN), has said. Fidel Ruzigandekwe, the Executive Director of Rwanda Wildlife Authority, a department under ORTPN, said on Monday that the primates are not endangered as those in the Congo basin region…
…The Congo basin which covers DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic is located about 2000 kilometres from the Virunga Mist, home to hundreds of the Mountain gorillas.
Ruzigandekwe said there are both regional and international efforts to prevent the deadly disease from spreading to the apes.
He said that one of the existing efforts was that of the Mountain Gorilla Health Contingence Plan (MGHCP), which is shared by the three countries, which checks for possible disease outbreaks in the Virunga Mist.”
This is good news, for now, but we cannot rely on the physical barrier, being the Virunga mountains, as the sole deterent of this highly communicable and virulent disease. Knowing that over 5,000 gorillas lives have been lost, a much more smaller, denser, fragile and immunologically isolated population of Mountain gorillas is more at risk than the populations of Western lowland gorillas that are facing this horrible disease.
Chimp Haven sued but denies the claims, of course
A commenter by the handle, DAB, made me very aware of Chimp Haven’s mismanagement details when I was praising them on their AAALAC accreditation achievement. And it seems like now mismanagement problems DAB eluded to have now become official enough to sue Chimp Haven over.
Here are some of the details of the suit being charged against the organization that I got from here, “Chimp Haven directors sued; group claims mismanagement,”
“A group of donors and supporters of Chimp Haven Inc., in Keithville have filed suit accusing the institution’s directors of mismanaging the facility.
Virginia K. Shehee, Mary Jansen, Tim and Sarah Goeders, Linda Koebner and others have asked the court for an injunction against the directors of the nonprofit residence for chimpanzees formerly used for research.
Director and President Linda Brent and director and Chairman of the Board Tom Butler are directly named in the suit.
The plaintiffs believe the defendants “have mismanaged the Chimp Haven Project in Caddo Parish in violation of that corporation’s purpose, to the detriment of the animals residing at Chimp Haven and to the detriment of fundraising and additional grant opportunities on which Chimp Haven must rely on to survive,” according to the suit filed recently.”
Of course the organization is denying the claims, as the organization opened its doors to a news team “in response to a lawsuit from some donors and supporters claiming mismanagement and poor care.” While, I know the best interests of the chimpanzees are at stake, I am a bit concerned how the death of a chimp named Woodruff who died of a heart attack while placed with three aggressive males, will be used as corroborative evidence for mismanagement. It may have been the directors decision, but a heart attack can be stress induced, genetic, or diet/excercise related. For an animal in capitivity, a combination of these three had a play in his untimely death.
