BUSHMEAT PROJECT WRITINGS

DOWNLOAD, READ, AND COMMENT ON OUR RESEARCH, ANALYSIS, AND SOLUTIONS TO THE BUSHMEAT CRISIS ...

As a service to students, professionals, government leaders and donors, The Bushmeat Project has provided some of our major documents for download and printing. These are free -- we urge you to use them to inform your thinking and guide your conservation and development pursuits. Please send your reactions, suggestions, and questions to. Integrating diverse perspectives is vital to the search for solutions.

Our view of the bushmeat crisis in Africa has evolved and expanded over the past decade. A large body of writings has emerged from our investigations and experiences. In total, more than 20 books, chapters in anthologies, journal and magazine articles, and monographs have been written by Bushmeat Project directors and associates. These provide a conservation psychologist's view of the depth of the crisis as well as an historical review of our struggle to understand and address the most immediate threat to the survival of wildlife, wilderness, and the cultures of indigenous peoples.

The most accessible and vivid integration of research and theory on the impact of commercial exploitation of African rain forests can be found in the new volume -- Consuming Nature. This 200 page large format photo-essay can be reviewed at consumingnature.org -- donors to The Bushmeat Project may receive gift copies of the Founders Edition. Selected sections of this ground-breaking work will be featured on the Bushmeat Project site.

Dr. Rose’s first ground-breaking work on the connection between people and wildlife was published in 1996 in a popular book on Kinship with Animals, edited by Michael Tobias and Kate Solisti-Mattelon. Rose’s chapter in that anthology -- On Tortoises, Monkeys and Men-- has been praised by students and professionals as an amazing tour de force. Rose’s revolutionary research on inter-species epiphanies is revealed in this work, in prose that inspires the general reader.

The article On the Road with a Gorilla Hunter: Turning Poachers to Protectors is also a popular work about a very different relationship between humans and wild animals. Dr. Rose’s first adventure in the rain forests of Cameroon is revealed as he treks abandoned logging roads and lives in flourishing hunting camps, searching for the psychological keys to converting poachers to protectors of wildlife. Here you will be introduced to Joseph Melloh, the heroic ex-gorilla hunter, whose biographical material has been compiled by Dr. Rose for over eight years, and will be the basis of a deeply insightful and moving volume which we hope to publish next year.

For the professional, we suggest you read Dr. Rose's article on Capacity in Conservation. It is a brief summary of problems and strategies to be addressed by conservation and development organizations in order to conserve rainforest biodiversity and restore local communities. Many of the key constructs and strategies from his decade exploring these topics are outlined in this piece.

NEW: A series of anthology chapters written by Dr. Rose have been published over the years. He is now consolidating this material with new discoveries into a trade book which will revolutionize people's thinking about our relationship and responsibility to nature. Short summaries of five of these seminal works are in our new Conservation and Social Change section. You may read and download these chapters from these summaries.

Conservation authors and journalists who are seeking historic citations can obtain the original publications by Dr. Rose which alerted the world to the bushmeat crisis -- a term he coined in 1996 in his report to the American and International Primate Societies in Madison Wisconsin. This first report was published in African Primates, the journal of IUCN/SSC, in 1998 and titled "Growing Commerce in Bushmeat". A French version of this seminal article is also available.

For conservation history buffs, the first article actually printed on the bushmeat crisis appeared in 1996 in the Pan African News, a publication of the Japanese Primate Research Association -- The African Great Ape Bushmeat Crisis, Pan Africa News, 3 (2): 1-6, December, 1996.

Disease transmission from wildlife to humans has raised increasing concern in the years since our first report on the bushmeat crisis. A seminal meeting to focus on this issue was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control in 1999. It was the first such event at which conservation professionals presented evidence to health care researchers to demonstrate the human-wildlife connections that are putting people in harm’s way. Dr. Rose presented a talk at this Workshop on the Potential impact of Hunting Practices on Cross-Species Transmission of Viruses (available here soon). A brief position statement by Dr. Rose; Human Health Could Depend on Saving Apes discusses early research findings by Dr. Beatrice Hahn tracing the origins of HIV to chimpanzees.

For more writings by Anthony Rose and his colleagues on conservation, bushmeat, apes and other endangered and charismatic fauna, rain forests, and biosynergy please refer to Dr. Rose’s Bio and CV. Talks and articles listed there may be available, or may be discussed directly with Dr. Rose by email to .

We recommend the writings and images of Karl Ammann. His photographs, some of which appear on this site, illuminate this situation like no others; his writings provide a distinct perspective on the issues of the bushmeat crisis.

See our compendium of On-Line Bushmeat, Primate, and Conservation Links.

Peer reviewed articles and professional summary information on topics related to the bushmeat crisis is at the website of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force.