Just a hundred years ago, roughly one million chimpanzees lived in the lush forests of equatorial Africa. Today, only about one tenth of that number remain due to habitat loss and human encroachment.

Gorilla and chimpanzee meat are considered delicacies in much of Africa.

April 3, 2001–Chimps and other wild animals including gorillas and monkeys are being hunted for their meat and sold commercially on a large scale. Called bushmeat, the flesh of chimps and other endangered species is considered a delicacy in much of Africa. Bushmeat, a nostalgic link to a past village life that is now largely gone, commands high prices at restaurants frequented by the new urban elite. This unsustainable slaughter of these animals is emptying one of the last great forests of the world.

Karl Amman's camera follows a hunter to his kill.

Writer and wildlife photographer Karl Amman stumbled across the largely illegal bushmeat trade when he took a riverboat trip down the Congo River in 1988. Startled by the numbers of orphaned baby chimps and wild animal carcasses he saw coming out of the forest, Amman took it upon himself to document and publicize the crisis.

Once at the site, Amman documents a slaughtered gorilla family.

At great personal risk, Amman followed poachers deep in to the forest to document the commercial trade. Using hidden cameras, Amman and his assistants obtained disturbing footage of smoked chimpanzee heads, hands and arms being sold along side meat from endangered elephants, gorillas and other protected species.

Logging roads have allowed more hunters to enter the dense jungle.

The bushmeat trade is the result of a complex confluence of politics and economics. Logging companies, mostly European and some Asian, interested in harvesting valuable trees for export have built roads in to the once-impenetrable million square miles of forest in central Africa. Hunters follow the loggers into the forest, and then often hire logging trucks to carry the bounty back out to urban markets, where an estimated 70 million people consume the bushmeat.

The new large-scale bushmeat trade has important implications not only for conservation but also for human health. There has always been some subsistence hunting of forest game on a small scale, and that's where HIV/AIDS came from, scientists believe. Some time in the 1940's, the virus jumped to humans, probably during the butchering of chimps. But now with the widespread butchering of bushmeat, there is constant contact between the two closely-related species. So the risk increases that new diseases will make the same leap to humans.

This smoked chimp hand brings a higher price than beef or pork.

Primatologists in particular are dismayed at the vast and uncontrolled bushmeat trade, because it threatens the continued existence of wild, natural groups of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Over the last forty years, intensive study of chimps in the field has yielded tremendous insights into the origin of fundamental human attributes- like tool use, warfare, altruism and mothering. Yet, just as we're discovering how close we really are to our primate cousins, we're destroying them at an unprecedented rate.

An orphaned chimp with the remains of its family.

An especially cruel by-product of the bushmeat trade is orphan chimps. Too small to be worth killing for their meat, a generation of baby chimps are being sold to zoos or as pets, only to be destroyed or discarded when they get too big to control. Countless others are left simply to starve.

Amman's efforts have brought international attention to the crisis.

Today, Karl Amman is raising two orphaned chimps and has established a sanctuary near his home outside of Nairobi, Kenya. He's turned into a full time advocate, as have a number of primate researchers, including Jane Goodall. They're engaged in a desperate battle to ensure that in the future, people won't ever have to be nostalgic for the days when chimps and other primates used to live in the wild.