When the Wildlife Conservation Society set out to study bush meat consumption in Gabon, researchers reluctantly had to rule out some sites. Especially in the rainy season, it became hard to gain access to some rural communities. Washed-out roads grounded trucks in the muck, and precarious mountain passes were in some cases too risky to navigate.

The villages that did make the cut were no more central — they usually had no electricity or running water and were days away from any city. That was vital, given that the researchers wanted to study people, often on the outskirts of national parks, who rely entirely on the environment for their food. In Gabon, that includes monkeys, forest antelope, porcupines and other wild animals.

“These are typical villages in the middle of the rain forest that might be seen on some documentary,” said Steffen Foerster, a behavioral ecologist at Barnard College and the lead author of a new paper on bush meat practices. “People have the most basic living conditions, and most rely on hunting in the forest to supply themselves with protein.”

Dr. Foerster’s paper is one of two published this month in the journal Conservation Biology that explore the intricacies of bush meat consumption in Central and West Africa. I plan to delve into them on the blog this week. (Two weeks ago, I wrote about the consumption of lemurs in Madagascar, which goes against a traditional taboo in that Indian Ocean country.)

Dr. Foerster and his colleagues sought to analyze the complex web of factors influencing a household’s decision to consume bush meat. They arrived on the scene a few years after three new national parks — Biringou, Ivindo and Monts de Cristal — were established in 2002. Scientists hoped to examine how the parks’ creation affected the livelihoods of villagers who were living on the parks’ fringes as well as local wildlife.

A survey of 1,219 households in 121 villages revealed that even in the most rural conditions, decision-making is anything but simple. “There’s not just one factor but a complex combination of factors that influence what people eat,” Dr. Foerster said.

Primary among these were a family’s wealth, the land cover surrounding a village, the distance of the village to the nearest park and the level of education of the head of the household.

The wealthier a family, the higher its odds of consuming bush meat — but only of certain species. Affluent families can afford guns, which are more efficient for bagging some elusive animals than a poorer household’s typical snare trap. A tenfold increase in wealth almost doubles the chances that the family will regularly consume forest antelope, for example. Poorer households consume bush meat but are excluded from eating certain species, probably because they rely on more primitive hunting methods.

Household size also strongly influenced the quantity of bush meat a family consumed, but not in the direction the researchers would have guessed: the larger the family, the lower its per-capita protein consumption. The researchers do not figure out exactly why this is, but suggest that it could be related to the number of men in each house (men traditionally do the hunting) or the possibility that a finite amount of time devoted to hunting cannot make up for the extra mouths to feed.

Almost 100 percent of families consumed bush meat during a 12-day survey period, and about 95 percent of consumption was limited to 20 species. Endangered animals like leopards, elephants and gorillas occasionally turned up in hunting inventories, but at lower rates than the more common species.

“It’s good because among those 20 species, we didn’t see the endangered ones that we were worried about,” Dr. Foerster said.

The most common animals included various duikers, or forest antelope; porcupines; wild hogs; and monkeys. Animals like duikers can sustain relatively high hunting pressures since they reproduce quickly. Monkeys, on the other hand, often have very low reproductive rates, so their presence on the list is worrying. “Over the long term, monkeys certainly wouldn’t deal very well with continuous hunting at high rates,” Dr. Foerster said.

The surveyed villages were generally nonmarket economies. Households hunted their own meat rather than purchasing it, and 85 percent did not sell their catch at the market. “Here, villages are so remote that it’s not convenient for them to go and sell things or trade at the market,” Dr. Foerster said.

No monetary value as such could be assigned to bush meat, so the researchers used a system called unit values to assess its potential worth. They asked hunters what price they would hypothetically assign to the meat or what quantity of goods with a known value they would trade for their catch. From this data, they arrived at an approximate “price” of different bush meat varieties.

Their results revealed that unit values vary widely within and across species, probably reflecting availability or meat preference. Fortunately, rare species did not seem to be priced any higher than common ones. For example, primates fetched about the same price as brush-tailed porcupines, which are more common.

This is good news for conservation, since it suggests that people could be steered away from the rarer animals and encouraged to focus on common species.

The researchers suspect that alternative protein sources, like poultry or livestock, are missing from villagers’ menus simply because they are not available. “There’s no tradition of keeping livestock,” Dr. Foerster said. “Perhaps one approach could be making certain species of livestock more available and widespread.”

Other studies found that Central Africans usually rank chicken similarly to their favorite bush meat varieties, so the potential may exist for alleviating pressure on wild species by introducing poultry farming.

Along with habitat protection. Dr. Foerster says, efforts to increase livestock availability and discourage hunting of certain species could be a buffer against impending population declines of sensitive species like primates. Though Gabonese laws include fines and even imprisonment for hunting endangered animals, enforcement in remote areas is often nonexistent. A complete ban on hunting is no solution either, since it would jeopardize human welfare.

“If hunting laws are enforced — if people are excluded — what will happen to their livelihoods?” Dr. Foerster said. “The complexity of factors requires that the management of biodiversity in the context of human exploitation of natural resources is informed primarily by the local context.”

The Wildlife Conservation Society plans to monitor the villages over the next 10 years to promote solutions for both local people and wildlife.

(Source: www.nytimes.com )