Monday, July 23, 2007

Bushmeat Hunters

July 16, 2007. Mole National Park, Ghana.

Racing the last light of the day, we met a group of hunters from the community of Larabanga in order to recreate a dreamlike sequence that would illustrate hunting pressures on the park. Bushmeat is an integral part of Ghanaian culture, and hunters, like these, play a vital role in providing food for their communities.

The question that the people of Ghana face focuses on how to create sustainable harvests of bushmeat without depleting the resource. At the moment hunting is regulated to a certain degree by issuing permits, but this practice in and of itself is not enough according biologists like Moses Sam, one of our featured scientists. Currently, there are efforts underway to farm some animals, such as grass cutters, which are giant rats, but the results are mixed. Farming these animals is not simple and still requires a fair amount of food to produce a harvestable animal.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey guys, I really like your b-logs. What a great picture of Africa, and all so fresh. I have bookmarked your page on my computer and look forward to every new post.

Andrew