By Tomo Nishihara

One day in 1997 a pygmy man in the village of Bomassa approached Djoni Bourges, the Warden of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. He told Djoni, “I saw a smoked gorilla arm in the village! It must have been hunted somewhere nearby!” At that time I was the only expatriate helping Djoni keep minimum operations going in the Park. The Republic of Congo was in the midst of a civil war and the situation was not stable, even around this remote "Park at the edge of the world." The report of a gorilla killing was disturbing because, since the National Park was established in 1993, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Congolese authorities have made a great effort to explain to local people why they should not hunt protected species, meeting with them again and again to reinforce the message. These efforts have been very successful and for the last decade almost no illegal hunting has occurred around the villages of Bomassa and Boncoin, which border the Park. The local people seemed to understand that they should not hunt protected animals, such as gorillas and elephants. So, the poaching should not happen, Djoni believed.

Djoni, Mike Fay (the former Director of WCS's Nouabalé-Ndoki Project), and I were particularly anxious about the incident because we thought that the gorilla that had been killed might be ‘Ebobo’. Ebobo is a lone silverback that has regularly visited Park Headquarters for years. He has never feared us and, miraculously, was almost completely habituated on his first contact with Mike. It would be quite easy to shoot Ebobo because he never flees from any human. To find out what had happened and whether Ebobo had been killed, Djoni started an investigation in and around both villages. He interviewed the village elder in Boncoin who supposedly traded gorilla meat in exchange for local alcohol. The elder stressed that he got his gorilla meat from across the border in the Central African Republic. He insisted that nobody in the villages was involved with the gorilla killing. But after a few days of intelligence work, Djoni discovered that most of the villagers had known about the gorilla killing all along, but tried to hide the facts. Some of them even beat up the pygmy who told the village secret to Djoni. Finally, Djoni got the real story from the son of the pygmy who actually killed the gorilla. The story was…

“One day the village elder of Boncoin gave his hunting rifle to a pygmy, saying that he should shoot some animals for food: something like duiker (small antelope) or red river hog, both of which can be legally hunted by local villagers. When the pygmy went into the forest close to Boncoin, he suddenly encountered a gorilla. The gorilla was aggressive and started to charge him. The pygmy was surprised at the gorilla's aggressiveness and had no option but to shoot it. He killed the gorilla, a silverback. He and his companions cut it into pieces and put them on a fire table to smoke them, then they brought them back to the village. The village elder told the pygmy not to tell the story, and took some pieces including the arm. He then traded with a man in Bomassa, exchanging the gorilla arm for some local alcohol.”

Once we had established the facts of the case, I had the pygmy take me to the killing site a couple of times looking for clues. Although the pygmy said that he left the gorilla head near the site, we could not find anything except the fire table. If we could have found it, we could easily have established whether this gorilla was in fact Ebobo, whose distinctive, pushed-in nose makes him immediately identifiable, if not particularly handsome. Unfortunately, some other animal(s) must have moved or eaten the head.

The village elder who owned the rifle finally confessed that he tried to cover up the incident and that he had traded the gorilla meat for alcohol. According to him, he had to do that because otherwise he could not get food and alcohol. Because of the war, the Park Project was not able to pay the workers well or on time. A considerable part of the problem was that some donors stopped the flow of funding to the project because it was in the midst of a war.
We might say that this incident was just an accident. The pygmy could not avoid the gorilla’s attack and shot it. But at the same time, we have to recognize that the incident occurred in the midst of the war. If it had been any other time, somebody, perhaps even the hunter himself, would have come to tell the park authorities what had happened. Continued employment on the Park project has become more valuable to the local villagers than hunting and they are quick to inform on anybody whose actions threaten their employment. But in this case they didn't report the incident. The villagers were not receiving their usual salary from the Project and were having difficulty obtaining food. They were hunting more than usual because of the lack of cash: which made the accident more likely in the first place. Once it had occurred, they were afraid to report the incident to the authorities because doing so might jeopardize their only remaining source of food.

This story suggests how difficult it is to control poaching and/or the illegal trade of wildlife, particularly in difficult times. We should recognize that it is not easy to keep local people focused on conservation when their basic needs are not being met. We have to think about this more seriously. What can we do to keep proper conservation management in place under such conditions? One clear answer is not to shut funding off at the first sign of trouble. Interruptions in funding wreak havoc on conservation projects around the region, erasing years of hard won gains in a few short weeks. If we don't find a way to sustain funding, this tragedy will continue to repeat itself.

If there is a happy ending to this story, it involves the silverback Ebobo. After a couple of months of anxious waiting Ebobo eventually showed up at Park Headquarters, as calm as ever. What's more, recent reports suggest that this perennial bachelor may have found a bride. He has now been sited several times in the vicinity Park Headquarters with an adult female in tow. Apparently, gorilla females may actually subscribe to the proposition that a nice personality is better than simple good looks.