In Cameroon there are fears that the practice of eating bushmeat - wild meat hunted in the rainforest, including endangered gorillas and chimpanzees - could trigger a new global pandemic of viruses. Unreported World investigates.
Reporter Evan Williams and director James Brabazon also meet the British woman battling the trade and looking after the animals orphaned by the slaughter.
Eighty percent of all meat eaten in Cameroon is bushmeat. To understand how the trade works, the team travels to the Dja Reserve in the south east of the country, where the tracks and clearings created by logging companies have opened up the once-impenetrable jungle to bushmeat poachers.
Williams meets some of the wardens trying to combat the poachers. There are only 60 wardens to cover the 2000 square miles of the Dja Reserve. Until 2009 they were funded by the EU. Now they're on their own and it's dangerous work.
One warden has already been killed by poachers this year and many have been injured.
Williams and Brabazon walk into the forest with the wardens and meet a group of indigenous Baka people, the so-called pygmies. They tell Williams that people come four or five times a week looking for all sorts of bushmeat and hire locals to go and hunt for them.
One warden tells Williams that the local hunters get around 25 to 30 Euros for a chimpanzee.
But the Baka have something even more shocking to reveal. Eating gorilla meat has wiped out one of their neighbouring villages: 25 men, women and children died. There was only one person who survived, and that person didn't eat the meat.
The team heads back to the capital, Yaounde, to meet Professor Dominique Baudon at the Pasteur Centre. He's on the frontline of protecting both Cameroon and the world from the threat of new viruses emerging from man's contact with apes and in particular the preparation and consumption of bushmeat.
He tells Williams he believes within the next 20 years new viruses, possibly similar to HIV or Ebola, will definitely appear. And this isn't just a problem for Africa. At least 11,000 tonnes of illegal bushmeat - including ape meat - are smuggled into Britain every year, much of it from Central Africa.
The team travels to Yokadouma, one of the most remote areas in Cameroon. Filming secretly, Unreported World meets a man with contacts to commercial poachers specialising in gorillas and chimps. He sets up a meeting with an ape hunter.
Shooting, eating or possessing part of a great ape can lead to three years in jail and a hefty fine in Cameroon, but in exclusive footage and access, poacher 'Frankie' tells Williams that just a few days before he had killed a female gorilla and her baby.
He has brought with him the severed arm of an adult gorilla, which is now a delicacy in Cameroon's big cities. The team is forced to leave by villagers angry that Frankie has revealed ape hunting to outsiders.
As demand for ape meat soars, so does the number of orphans created. Unreported World visits Rachel Hogan, who came to Cameroon from Birmingham 11 years ago. She has set up Ape Action Africa.
Rachel tells Williams she has seen an explosion in the numbers of orphans coming into the sanctuary in the past five years. There are currently 324 orphans at the centre in Mefou. They include 22 Western lowland gorillas - now a critically endangered species - and 107 chimpanzees.
Rachel is doing the best she can but the sad truth is that the apes she looks after can almost certainly never be returned to the wild; Cameroon is just too dangerous.
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Channel 4
Fri 25 May 2012
Series 2012 Episode 6
Cameroon: In Cameroon there are fears that the practice of eating bushmeat - wild meat hunted in the rainforest…
- Images of dead animals that some may find distressing
- This programme has episodes with subtitles available.
- 23 days left
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