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 29 where did they get meat? DHJanzen100760.jpg high resolution
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| Where did the animal protein come from that fed the village on the edge of the Sapoba forest? Undoubtedly there was the occasional wild animal that was taken by the hundreds of snares. And I did meet one person selling a very large gaboon viper on the side of the road, a snake that would have made a meat dinner for at least five people if not more. But the short answer is that the village ate very little animal protein. The 10-15 chickens like this one scrounging for food around the house were never harvested - their few eggs were harvested avidly. There were no livestock, and the meat from livestock in the market in town nearby (Sapoba) came from elsewhere in Nigeria. In short, traditional uses of the forest simply did not allow the production of livestock meat from either free-ranging livestock or by clearing forest for pasture. My neighbors were under instructions from me for an entire week to buy me any piece of meat that they encountered for sale in the market, no matter the price - the total purchased was one goat kidney. These people were in effect being deprived of wild meat by modern technology (the introduction of guns and snares decades earlier), but prevented from addressing the imbalance through livestock production by ancient prohibitions against forest clearing, undoubtedly reinforced by the desires of the ATPC to keep the forest concession as a sustained yield logging operation and desires of the government to keep the tax revenue and salaries from the ATPC coming in. Complex. | ||
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