Bushmeat is undoubtedly the single most significant blow to wildlife populations. Bushmeat is the word assigned to the unsustainable over utilization of the wildlife resources in Africa and other parts of the World where forests are being logged and simultaneously denuded of its wildlife inhabitants.

Historically, indigenous people have been utilizing animal meat from the forests for centauries; this has in the past been done sustainably. The picture changed with the arrival of logging companies, who started pushing logging roads from horizon to horizon into impenetrable forest. They then brought in thousands upon thousands of logging staff who needed to be fed, and these would generally arrive without any provision for food. Instead hundreds of hunters would be brought in to kill animals in the surrounding forest to feed the loggers. These hunters are poorly paid, but are allowed to sell excess meat from the forest to generate extra cash, they are even permitted to transport their bounty on the logging trucks as they haul their timber to export yards.

This changed the whole face of forest utilization, the villages got sucked into lucrative forestry logging jobs, the villagers also became reliant on the abundance of meat coming from the forest, which were previously impenetrable, not only were the loggers now being fed, but a whole meat industry developed in the villages and towns. Soon this meat “Bushmeat” found its way abroad, and onto the menus of many eastern restaurants, meat from the forests became a commodity, which soon found itself in every corner of the globe.

Wild life populations were devastated, driven into pockets of forest in diminished numbers, the carnage goes on, even the isolated areas are now being exploited, and it is believed that all wild animals species will be extinct in the wild in Central Africa by 2050 at the current rate of demise.

The Bushmeat Crisis Taskforce, a USA Zoo initiative was started in 1999 to address the situation, they immediately did a study to ascertain the extent of the problem, results were devastating, more than the equivalent meat of 10 million head of cattle was being taken out of the Central African Rain Forests each year, this was only a small percentage of what was actually being killed, as many animals were snared, and rotted away in the forest.

There is now a silence sweeping over the forests, devoid of life this sad state of affairs has been aptly named “Empty Forest Syndrome”