Saving Rwanda’s ‘gentle giants’!

Frankfurt / DPA

It’s too soon to sound the all clear, but international conservation organizations have recorded a modest rise in the number of mountain gorillas in the volcanic mountains of central Africa.
Estimates put the number in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda at 800.
This means that they are still highly endangered, but the population has risen from just 790 in 2010.
In the fight for the future of the gentle giants, Christof Schenck, managing director of the Frankfurt Zoological Society (ZGF) sees tightly controlled tourism as having a positive
influence.
Sustainable development, which enables greater prosperity and economic development for people in the gorillas’ range, also protects the animals from poaching, he says.
“No other animal species can generate so much money when alive as gorillas,” Schenck says of gorilla tourism in Rwanda.
In Rwanda, small groups of tourists with a special permit can spend an hour with a so-called “habituated” group. This means that gamekeepers guide them into the territory of a group of gorillas, which have been made familiar with the sight of humans over the course of several years.
In order to avoid stressing the animals, visitors are only allowed to spend one hour per day with the gorillas. The permit currently costs around 800 dollars.
“We worked it out,” Schenck says.
“There are around 200 visitor days in the year. We know what the life expectancy of a gorilla is. On a rough calculation, we came to a figure of 4 million US dollars – per gorilla. That is huge and a massive amount of potential.”
Since the income from tourism flows into conservation and payment for the gamekeepers, this form of tourism is a valuable contribution to the protection of the species, he says.
According to Schenck, it is important that the number of visitors is kept to a limit and that additional permits are not granted secretly, for an extra charge.
“It has to be restricted, it has to be strictly controlled,” stresses Schenck, who considers encounters with gorillas among the “most impressive animal encounters ever.”
Just as important is making sure no tourist with a cold or other contagious diseases gets close to the gorillas.
“There is a certain amount of risk for the transmission of illness, because we are genetically so similar,” says Schenck.
“The risk is much greater from us to the gorillas than the other way around, because we carry germs from around the whole world. Even bronchial infections can be fatal for the young ones.”
In the part of Virunga National Park in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, ZGF workers wear protective masks over their nose and mouth when they get close to gorillas.
On the DRC side of Africa’s oldest national park, park head Emmanuel de Merode can only dream of tourist incomes like those in Rwanda. The region has been torn apart by military conflicts and ethnic violence for more than 30 years. The uncertainty which the militias bring to the region fosters poaching.
For the people in the surrounding areas, who have had to flee from violence repeatedly, there are hardly any prospects.
“It really is paradise and hell,” Schenck says of the eastern DRC, where he says “Africa’s most beautiful landscapes” with volcanic mountains and lava lakes are to be found. Covering an area of 8,000 square kilometres, Virunga is probably the most species-rich park in Africa.
Many of the problems have remained the same since the ZGF first got involved around 60 years ago – poaching, humans encroaching on nature, too few and often underpaid gamekeepers.
Schenck was impressed that the indigenous gamekeepers continued to protect “their” gorillas, despite all the dangers, and even in years when the international experts had to leave the region for security reasons.
Virunga remains a “global core region” for the ZGF, Schenck stresses. But while there are positive signs with regard to the mountain gorillas, despite the ongoing threat, more attention now needs to be paid to the situation in the Congo Basin in the west of the huge country. There, the “dramatic decline” in lowland gorillas is a great cause for concern.
Within a few years, the number of the animals has dropped from 16,000 to around 3,800, the biologist says.