We ask ourselves
questions such as, what happens when one day you visit the Zoo, the National
park and you find that you are surrounded by a great cloud of silence!. No
birds, No insects and most of all No apes. How would you feel? Myself I don’t
know and don’t want to imagine the immediate horrors that my mind will be preoccupied
with.
Great apes are of
diverse species from Gorillas, Bonobo, Orangutans and chimpanzees; they are the
only immediate ancestors that we humans have. We burn down their forest; a home
they have stayed in for more than a 100 decades. We humans have proved to be inhumane
with a recent incident being the Borneo human conflict where the community set
up a tree on fire and burned the orangutans which succumbed to level 3 burns (http://us.foto.news.viva.co.id/read/7864-evakuasi-orangutan-sekarat).
Are we being protectors of the earth as God had instructed man, I guess not we
are clouded by our inner selfish gains and egoistic approaches.
We slash and burn
forest in the name of agricultural expansion; we do not ask ourselves questions
what will happen to the animals in the forests. Ask yourself? What will happen
to them? I know that the Gorillas of the DR Congo are suffering; they are
deprived of peaceful and tranquil coexistence. Their lives are threatened by
our uncompassionate actions. The warlords are seeking them for food and skin.
This begs the question
what can we do to save this peaceful and majestic creatures. They deserve
protection at most. Organizations such as the GRASP-UNEP (www.un-grasp.org),
Borneo orangutan survival foundation and LAGA Cameroon are just but a few of
those institutions set up to protect the great apes.
How can technology save
the great apes? In my opinion there are several approaches that can be employed
to enable protection of the great apes. One of the approaches is Smart Collaring;
Using accelerometer technology and GPS.This approach not only tracks the
location of an animal but also tells us about every move that it makes. Collaring
is used to understand the behavior of certain animal species in the hope of
reducing conflicts between humans and animals and help in improving wildlife
management and interaction.
We can borrow some
technology that is being used for elephant conservation called Animal Texting. The
technology is currently being used with Kenyan elephant’s conservation in
Laikipia district with the aim to cut the scale of the human wildlife
conflicts. This enables elephant’s tracking hence those nearby communities are
warned about an approaching elephant. We can use the same for Great apes
conservation. Secondly, use of camera traps to be able to document the major
causes of animal population decline and incidences of conflict where they
occur.
Using scare tools and
tactics such as alarms and shock collars, this employed on the male apes to
tame them and restrict their range of movement, and thus cut human ape
conflict. Let’s use available technology and save the Great Apes.
