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SHOCKING FACTS ABOUT POACHING IN CONGO

1. The difference between poaching and hunting is the law. Meaning poaching is hunting without permission from government or land owners. However, legal hunters kill millions of animals per year.
2. There are two types of poachers. The subsistence one who hunts for food and the commercial one who hunts with the purpose to sell the meat and/or body parts.
3. Poaching is fuelled by food insecurity, greed, armed conflicts and the high demand for animal body parts across the world.
4. Over 500 Park rangers are killed annually trying to save animals from poachers
5. A 2010 United Nations report suggests that gorillas could disappear from large parts of the Congo Basin by the mid-2020s. Only less than 900 mountain gorillas are left. If we don’t act now, they would be extinct in our lifetime.
6. At the beginning of the 20th century there were a few million African elephants. Today elephants are now considered endangered, there are about 450,000-700,000 African elephants left.
7. Typically the largest adults, with the biggest tusks are poached – putting the matriarchs of elephant herds at the greatest risk.
8. In Africa, bushmeat is any meat which can be hunted in the jungle (bush). You may also refer to it as game meat.
9. Bushmeat accounts for up to 80 percent of the protein intake of people in Central Africa and Congo particularly.
10. The poaching industry in Africa is worth billions of dollars annually.
11. Up to 6 million tons of bushmeat are extracted from the Congo Basin alone each year — nearly the equivalent of the annual beef production of Brazil.To produce this same amount of cattle in the region, as many as 25 million hectares of forest would have to be cleared for pasture — an area about the size of Great Britain.
12. Poaching can lead to the disruption of ecological and evolutionary processes, changes in species composition within ecosystems and a general reduction in biological diversity, creating “empty forests” — so-called because they lack any large animal species.
13. In the Congo, increasing population and trade from rural to urban areas compounded with the lack of any sizeable domestic meat sector are the main drivers of unsustainable levels of hunting.

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