i adopted an infant mountainback gorilla a few months ago. information on adopting infants and adults can be found at dian fossey's website. at the end of my small animal practicum, our group went to the zoo. we saw the tigers being fed, the lions play fighting...i was loving it...but when we got to the primates, and i saw the gorillas sitting on a small hill looking off into the distance, they made me cry. that pain and sadness comes from the same place when i see men degrade eachother.

there's no question i love dogs and cats etc. etc. but when i look into the eyes of a gorilla i see a beautiful humanity, something i rarely see in mankind.

here's an article and you can also check out this week's issue of Nature which has a cover story on the declining numbers of Gorillas and Chimps.

Apes on the verge of extinction
Tuesday, 8 April 2003

Chimpanzee and gorilla numbers in their
last African stronghold have crashed over
the past 20 years due to commercial
hunting for 'bushmeat' and an epidemic of
Ebola fever, a disturbing new report has
found.

Their fall has been so rapid, severe and
under-appreciated, that the conservation
status of both species should be upgraded
immediately to the critically endangered
category, according to the authors of the
report published in the latest issue of the
journal Nature.

"Without aggressive investments in law
enforcement, protected area management
and Ebola prevention, the next decade will
see our closest relatives pushed to the brink of extinction," said Dr Peter
Walsh, of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton
University in New Jersey, USA. "The stark truth is that if we do not act
decisively our children may live in a world without wild apes."

The international research team's findings of a population crisis overturn
previous assumptions that gorillas and common chimps had a secure haven
in western equatorial Africa because the forests there were relatively intact.
Gabon and the Republic of Congo alone are thought to hold about 80% of the
world's gorillas and most of the common chimpanzees.

When the team surveyed ape sleeping nests at sites across Gabon over the
past three years and compared the results with a national survey conducted
two decades earlier - when high-density ape populations spanned the nation -
it estimated conservatively that ape numbers had plunged by more than half.

The actual decline may be far greater, the report said. Only in the southwest and northeast of the country, in forests far distant from human nfluence,were ape numbers still high.

Those that suffered most were nearest to roads, Gabon's four major urban
centres, or sites of human Ebola outbreaks - revealing that ape numbers
cannot be reliably estimated by measuring the state of their forests alone.

"The primary cause of the decline in ape numbers during this period was
commercial hunting, facilitated by the rapid expansion of mechanised
logging," the report said. Economic migration and resettlement policies had
also had an impact.

Hunting for "bushmeat" was no longer a localised village-based activity but an organised commercial industry taking advantage of logging roads to gain
access to remote forests and supply salaried urban consumers.
"Furthermore, Ebola haemorrhagic fever is currently spreading through ape
populations in Gabon and Congo and now rivals hunting as a threat to apes,"
the report said.

Wildlife conservation workers have found many ape carcasses in Congo
forests over the past 18 months as the Ebola epidemic has worked its way
through ape populations there, especially those near where a human
epidemic occurred in 2001 at Mekambo.

A study population of gorillas at Lossi once numbered 143 individuals but
after exhaustive searches only seven could be found alive: seven carcasses
from that group have been found since December alone.

The epidemic is now approaching the world's densest gorilla and
chimpanzee populations in Odzala National Park.

Gorillas and common chimps are presently classified by the World
Conservation Union as endangered. A species listed as critically endangered
is expected to suffer "a reduction of at least 80% . . . within the next 10 year or three generations".

At the rate of decline exposed by the new survey, the two ape populations
would be expected to fall an additional 80% within 33 years - representing
only 1.5 generations for chimps and about two generations for gorillas.

Bob Beale – ABC Science Online