conservation | a bonobo humanity?

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vive les bonobos

I’ve written a lot about a bonobo future for humans, but what about the future of real bonobos? How long will they have one in the wild?

It’s likely the bonobo population has never been large. Their range has always been limited, presumably because they’ve inhabited a fertile niche south of the Congo River, and have had no reason to stray from it. All wild bonobos happen to inhabit one human country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The geographic range of chimpanzees, of which there are four sub-species, includes nineteen countries throughout west and east-central Africa. Both species are on the endangered list. The World Wildlife Fund has estimated the population at between 10,000 and 50,000 and declining. It’s a large margin for error, due to the difficulties of trying to track numbers in one of the most dangerous locations on the planet. It’s probable that the numbers today are well to the lower end of that spectrum. They have a slow reproduction rate, poaching and habitat loss are a perennial issue, and there’s the common notion in faraway regions such as China and South-East Asia that these ‘exotic’ creatures make for prestigious pets or that their body parts provide miraculous remedies. The live trade is generally in infants, which more often than not involves killing their parents. They’re not all being shipped overseas however – bonobo ‘charms’ (whatever they are) are quite common in the Congo itself, according to WWF and other sources.

Many of the DRC’s humans are fighting for survival themselves, and are competing with bonobos for forest resources, so deforestation is an issue. But the live trade is much more lucrative than that for bushmeat. Most of their habitat is unprotected, and the natives are not necessarily aware that they’re breaking the law, if in fact they are, in capturing these animals. Here’s a grim description of the situation from the wildlife website Mongabay:

Dead apes are chopped up and sold for meat and body parts. Meat is generally consumed by middle- to upper-class urban families, as well as foreigners living there. … On average, a kilo of such meat would cost between $20 to $40 in local markets … prices vary according to species and size. Body parts such as the skin, hands, and head are used as medicine and in spiritual rituals… The head takes the highest price at between $500 and $1,500, and hands between $20 and $50 each.

Trying to save and defend bonobos in the DRC is a dangerous business. The war-torn country is over-supplied with deadly weaponry, and it’s difficult to win people over to conservation when they are so impoverished and the trade is so lucrative. Improving the lives of the native human population is probably more important than education, but little appears to be happening in that regard. The natives have formed gangs to facilitate the trade, and conservationists have received death threats. The general corruption of the government is obviously a problem too, though international exposure may help to turn things around. The first nationally announced arrest of hunters only occurred in 2019.

Still, there are many conservationists working for a brighter future for bonobos. The Bonobo Conservation Initiative has for a long time been promoting indigenous leadership in land management for biodiversity in bonobo habitats, in particular the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve. The plan is to extend this reserved area into a Bonobo Peace Forest, ‘a constellation of community-based reserves in the Congo rainforest supported by sustainable development’. Ecotourism is seen as a key to providing a future for both the bonobos and the human communities of the region, but this is a delicate issue, as the natural life-style of our cousins needs to be maintained. The DRC itself needs international support – it has suffered devastation in the past from the worst forms of colonialist exploitation, and it has never been properly compensated. Now, the nation is, hopefully, beginning to realise what a treasure lies within its forests. Vive les bonobos!

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