meat is murder

Campaigning has to grow with the modern world; here is a film that has been made about the damage to everybody of the bushmeat trade. It is being shown on big screen tvs in rural Africa…

Anti-bushmeat campaign goes cinematic

Conservationists in Africa have long fought a losing battle to end the illegal and dangerous trade in bushmeat but one group is now hoping for better results from a cinematic campaign in Kenya.

“Carcasses,” a new film that debuted last week, aims to educate rural communities about the devastating consequences to health, wildlife and food security posed by the indiscriminate killing of animals for food.

The hour-long short feature, produced by the British-based Born Free Foundation, depicts one such community in Kenya struggling to survive after the wildlife on which it has depended for decades are hunted to extinction.

The foundation, named for the book and film by naturalist Joy Adamson about the lioness Elsa in central Kenya’s Rift Valley, intends to take the movie on a travelling road show to a dozen villages in rural Kenya in the coming weeks.

It hopes the drama and Kiswahili dialogue will register with villagers in a way that dry lectures condemning poaching from stern wildlife rangers or enthusiastic European animal rights activists may have failed.

“We are engaging them in a different way,” said Alice Owen, Born Free’s regional representative for east Africa. “The characters are real people in the villages so the audience can identify with them.”

“Carcasses” also underscores a shift in the focus of many conservation groups from trophy hunting poachers likely to go after rhino and elephant to rural Africans trapping bushmeat animals like monkeys, fowl and hare.

“Most of these communities are doing it for food, but we’re starting to see a trend where people are snaring specifically to sell,” Owen said.

More than 6 000 snares have been seized from the Kenyan bush since 2000 by Youth for Conservation, an organisation assisting the Born Free Foundation in its anti-bushmeat campaign here.

But the snares are being set as fast as they are being removed, Owen said, prompting the foundation to alter its strategy for the big screen, or at least widescreen televisions on which to play Carcasses DVD.

The film, which revolves around the trials and tribulations of members of the Taita tribe near Kenya’s wildlife-rich Tsavo West National Park, maintains a light tone, but hammers home its message with thinly veiled monologues.

“Thousands of animals are being killed to satisfy rural and urban households,” a Kenya Wildlife Service officer intones in one scene. “And the villagers seem to think the root cause of the problem is the poachers.

“That is not true, for they are part of the problem,” he says.

Before it was adapted to film, “Carcasses” was a stage play performed in Nairobi secondary schools by a university theatre group who make up most of the cast in the on-screen version.

“The youth are the future poachers and we thought a play would be much more interesting than a seminar,” said author Joseph Kombani.

Owen said an urban audience was key to the foundation’s campaign because they unknowingly provide a market for bushmeat.

In a 2004 survey it titled “Eating the Unknown,” Born Free found that 25 percent of meat sold as “goat” or “beef” in Nairobi butcheries were actually bushmeat and 19 percent contained traces of bushmeat.

The report concluded that “unsuspecting customers” are at risk of contracting “not only food poisoning from rancid meat, but dangerous diseases such as anthrax”.

At the end of the film, after several villagers become ill from eating a diseased antelope, the rest vow to remove the snares they have set.

Owen acknowledged that the attitude of villagers off-screen is not likely to change so dramatically. But she remained optimistic of the film’s ability to captivate its audience and spark debate throughout Kenya.

“If people know that this is a problem,” she said, “we can start to see how to tackle this as a nation.”