Abstract
War is awful for people and for wildlife. The “Great African War” of the 1990s and 2000s was the worst in modern African history. An estimated 3.9 million people died while wildlife clearly suffered. The purpose of this chapter is to look at the effects of the war and subsequent political instability on the people and nonhuman primates living in the Lomako Forest. To do this, we compared the prewar and postwar ranging and community demographics data of two bonobo communities living near the N’deli site in the Lomako Forest. One community was not directly observed in the study area after the war while the second moved outside of their former range and saw a decrease in community number and average group size. We also compared the prewar and postwar demographics of four monkey species living in the forest. For all of the species, average group size was lower while for three out of the four species the population density decreased as well. Overall, the population density of monkeys living in Lomako went from 165 to 83.6 individuals/km2. These results suggest an increase in hunting pressures faced by nonhuman primates because of an increasingly hungry human population with little income. Finally, we comment on the ethics of habituating primates in politically unstable regions.
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Acknowledgements
Very special thanks go to the people of the Lomako Forest who endured the conflict and have helped us with our studies before, during, and after the war. Thanks also to Nick Malone, Amy Cobden, Monica Wakefield, Alexana Hickmott, Janet Nackoney and Claudine André. We would like to thank the NSF and the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation for funding this research. We would also like to thank Jef Dupain and the African Wildlife Foundation for assistance during the study seasons.
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Waller, M.T., White, F.J. (2016). The Effects of War on Bonobos and Other Nonhuman Primates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In: Waller, M. (eds) Ethnoprimatology. Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30469-4_10
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