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Gorillas go home
23/05/2003 22:27 - (SA)
Lagos - Nigerian officials and conservationists won a small but symbolic victory in the battle against Africa's animal smugglers Friday, sending two illegally captured gorillas back to their homeland in Cameroon.
Two female western lowland gorillas, nine-year-old Brighter and her younger playmate Twiggy, were airlifted from the northern Nigerian city of Kano, via Lagos, en route for the jungles of Cameroon.
There they will be cared for in a wildlife sanctuary near the rainforest where they were kidnapped by poachers and smuggled across the border as part of Africa's deadly trade in endangered species.
Primate protection campaigners hailed their return as a step in the right direction and a sign that Nigeria, once a major player in the illegal trade, is taking its conservation responsibilities more seriously.
Brighter and Twiggy probably represent a small proportion of the great apes killed for bushmeat or captured for the trade in exotic pets or circus attractions, but their rescue has heartened activists.
"The message is that Nigeria is committed to conservation measures," said Imeh Okodipo, Nigeria's minister of state for the environment as the apes' two specially built cages were transferred to a Cameroonian jet.
"This is to tell the poachers that they will not get away with it."
Ian Redmond, who observed the transfer for the United Nations' Great Ape Survival Project (Grasp), said he was delighted that Nigeria was joining a growing number of African nations taking primate survival seriously.
He and the minister said that next year Nigeria would host an intergovernmental conference on the great apes, and that Nigeria was looking to sustainable "eco-tourism" to help fund conservation.
The two gorillas were probably captured by poachers who slaughtered their mothers in the rainforest and smuggled the infants across the border to Nigeria and on to Kano, a great trading centre.
British businessman Paul Raad told AFP that he had taken pity on the baby apes when he saw them being hawked around the city and had bought them to protect them. Eight years later they finally set off for home.
"I'm certainly going to miss them, but this is always what I wanted for them. I think they will be happier in their natural environment. Kano is like the desert," he said.
Okodipo told reporters that enforcement operations would be stepped up and that Nigeria was seeking international assistance to help it stamp out the smuggling of endangered animals.
The next stage will be to protect the few remaining wild gorillas within Nigeria, where the pressures of living alongside a growing population of 120 million people have devastated primate numbers.
The west African nation was once said to have the most diverse population of monkeys and apes in the world, but as its forests have dwindled many animals have been hunted to extinction.
Nigeria's remaining gorillas - man's closest relatives apart from the chimpanzee - are from a particularly endangered sub-species of the lowland gorilla: the Cross River gorilla (gorilla gorilla diehli).
The species lives in the rugged moutainous jungle on the Nigeria Cameroon border. At the start of the 1980s there were thought to be 1 500 gorillas in the area, but now Grasp fears there may be less than 250.
Nigeria and the UN agency now plan to develop a nature reserve around Afi Mountain in southeastern Nigeria to protect the isolated troops of apes from loggers, hunters and animal smugglers.
Brighter and Twiggy will be taken to the Limbe Wildlife Centre in southwestern Cameroon, a project jointly run by the Nigerian-based primate NGO Pandrillus and the Cameroonian government.
- AFX
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